Semantic Annotation for Process Models: - Department of Computer ...

24 CHAPTER 2. PROBLEM SETTING
In [70], semantic annotation is used to establish links from the entities in the text
to their semantic descriptions so that a number of basic prerequisite for representation
of semantic annotations are identified:
• Ontology (or at least taxonomy) defining the entity classes. It should be possible
to refer to those classes;
• Entity identifiers which allow those to be distinguished and linked to their semantic
descriptions;
• Knowledge base with entity descriptions.
Semantic annotation of Web services has emerged under the hypothesis that semantics
can improve software reuse and discovery, significantly facilitate composition
of Web services and enable integrating legacy applications as part of business process
integration [203]. Semantic annotation of Web services is also called semantic markup
of Web services, for which numbers of semantic markup languages and approaches are
proposed such as WSMO [209], METEOR-S [187], OWL-S [198], SWSA/SWSL [181],
WSDL-S [203]. They can be categorized into: a) annotating information in WSDL
with ontologies (METEOR-S, WSDL-S); b) formalizing ontologies of Web service as a
Semantic Web services representation language (WSMO, OWL-S and SWSA/SWSL).
In [206], semantic annotation of process models is concerned as a prerequisite of the
vision of Semantic Business Process Management, which is very close to our proposal.
It will enable (or enhance) additional functionalities, namely the discovery and autocompletion
of process fragments, which lead to more effective modeling with respect to
the reuse of existing process artifacts at the conceptual level. The executable process
models can be partly generated from the conceptual business process models, which indicates
there are underlying links between business process models and executable Web
services. Semantic annotation of business process models could therefore enable more
automation in the implementation phase because the corresponding Semantic Web services
can be discovered automatically [206]. Although the work has just initiated and it
is still an ongoing project, it shares the same vision with ours, i.e. semantic annotation
can be also concerned as an alternative approach to achieve the semantic interoperability
of semi-structured sources such as business process models, in spite of semantic
annotations of unstructured sources (e.g. textual documents) and structured sources
(e.g. WSDL described Web services). Efforts on the semantic enrichment of enterprise
models by semantic annotations are also put by TG4 (Task Group 4: Semantic Enrichment
of Enterprise Modeling, Architectures and Platforms) in EU project INTEROP
(Interopreability Research for Networked Enterprise Applications and Software, FP6
508011) [62], in which the main achievable targets are the semantic interoperability for
model exchange, model transformation and model traceability. As the contemporary
work, our research shares some similar objectives and available technologies. Since we
participated in the INTEROP project, our contributions are also devoted as part of
the results in the project.