A business process may be modeled in different ways by different modelers even when utilizing the same modeling language. An appropriate method for solving ambiguity issues in process models caused by the use of synonyms, homonyms or different abstraction levels for process element names is the use of ontologybased descriptions of process models. So-called semantic business process models promise to support business process interoperability and interconnectivity. But, for (semi-) automatic process interoperability and interconnectivity two problems need to be solved. How can similar terms for process element names be automatically discovered and how can semantic business process composition be facilitated. In this paper we will present solutions for these problems based upon an OWL DL-based description of Petri nets.

Abstract. Scientific experiments are becoming increasingly large and complex, with a commensurate increase in the amount and complexity of data generated. Data, both intermediate and final results, is derived by chaining and nesting together multiple database searches and analytical tools. In many cases, the means by which the data are produced is not known, making the data difficult to interpret and the experiment impossible to reproduce. Provenance in scientific workflows is thus of paramount importance. In this paper, we provide a formal model of provenance for scientific workflows which is general (i.e. can be used with existing workflow systems, such as Kepler, myGrid and Chimera) and sufficiently expressive to answer the provenance queries we encountered in a number of case studies. Interestingly, our model not only takes into account the chained and nested structure of scientific workflows, but allows asks for provenance at different levels of abstraction (user views). 1

Abstract. Emerging methods for enterprise systems analysis rely on the representation of work practices in the form of business process models. A standard for representing such models is the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). BPMN models are mainly intended for communication and decision-making between domain analysts, but often they are also given as input to software development projects. Meanwhile, development methods for process-oriented systems rely on detailed process definitions that are executed by process engines. These process definitions refine BPMN models by adding data manipulation, application binding and other implementation details. A major standard for process implementation is the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, or BPEL for short). Accordingly, a natural method for end-to-end development of process-oriented systems is to translate BPMN models to BPEL definitions for subsequent refinement. However, instrumenting this method is challenging because BPEL imposes far more syntactic restrictions than BPMN so as to ensure correctness. Existing techniques for translating BPMN to BPEL only work for limited classes of BPMN models. This paper proposes techniques that overcome these limitations. Beyond its direct relevance in the context of BPMN and BPEL, the techniques presented in this paper address issues that arise generally when translating from graphical/unstructured to textual/structured (i.e. more programming-like) languages. 1

Abstract: Much recent research work discusses the transformation between different process modeling languages. This work, however, is mainly focussed on specific process modeling languages, and thus the general reusability of the applied transformation concepts is rather limited. In this article, we aim to abstract from concrete transformations by distinguishing two major paradigms for representing control flow in process modeling languages: block-oriented languages (such as BPEL and BPML) and graph-oriented languages (such as BPMN, EPCs, and YAWL). The contribution of this article are generic strategies for transforming from block-oriented process languages to graph-oriented languages, and vice versa.

Identification of behavioural contradictions is an important aspect of software engineering, in particular for checking the consistency between a business process model used as system specification and a corresponding workflow model used as implementation. In this paper, we propose causal behavioural profiles as the basis for a consistency notion, which capture essential behavioural information, such as order, exclusiveness, and causality between pairs of activities. Existing notions of behavioural equivalence, such as bisimulation and trace equivalence, might also be applied as consistency notions. Still, they are exponential in computation. Our novel concept of causal behavioural profiles provides a weaker behavioural consistency notion that can be computed efficiently using structural decomposition techniques for sound free-choice workflow systems if unstructured net fragments are acyclic or can be traced back to S- or T-nets.

Abstract. E-Business is constantly growing as organizations are trying to integrate electronically in order to automate exchange of information, goods and services. To construct inter-organizational processes, the involved enterprise processes have to be able to integrate their services directly, or by use of business-to-business interaction standards. A problem is that existing processes are so diverse in protocols, activity and message forms that it is impossible to start collaboration without comprehensive adaptations. In this paper, we propose a framework for interoperation of processes, which is based on requirements for equivalence of document exchanges. We argue that this level of equivalence is sufficient to enable existing enterprise processes to collaborate without internal redesign. The proposed framework is aimed to facilitate process collaboration by using a mediator layer to perform necessary adaptations, while minimizing requirements for process similarity. Keywords. E-Business, B2B, business process, workflow, service, process equivalence, collaboration.

During the previous years, we presented several results concerned with various issues related to the correctness of models for business processes and services (i. e., interorganizational business processes). For most of the results, we presented tools and experimental evidence for the computational capabilities of our approaches. Over the time, the implementations grew to a consistent and interoperable family of tools, which we call service-technology.org. This paper aims at presenting this tool family service-technology.org as a whole. We briefly sketch the underlying formalisms and covered problem settings and describe the functionality of the participating tools. Furthermore, we discuss several lessons that we learned from the development and use of this tool family. We believe that the lessons are interesting for other academic tool development.