Amit P. Sheth

An overview of workflow management: from process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure

Todays business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area.

Quality of Service for Workflows and Web Service Processes

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) have been used to support various types of business processes for more than a decade now. In workflows or Web processes for e-commerce and Web service applications, suppliers and customers define a binding agreement or contract between the two parties, specifying Quality of Service (QoS) items such as products or services to be delivered, deadlines, quality of products, and cost of services. The management of QoS metrics directly impacts the success of organizations participating in e-commerce. Therefore, when services or products are created or managed using workflows or Web processes, the underlying workflow engine must accept the specifications and be able to estimate, monitor, and control the QoS rendered to customers. In this paper, we present a predictive QoS model that makes it possible to compute the quality of service for workflows automatically based on atomic task QoS attributes. We also present the implementation of our QoS model for the METEOR workflow system. We describe the components that have been changed or added, and discuss how they interact to enable the management of QoS.

Ontology paper: The SSN ontology of the W3C semantic sensor network incubator group

The W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator group (the SSN-XG) produced an OWL 2 ontology to describe sensors and observations - the SSN ontology, available at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn. The SSN ontology can describe sensors in terms of capabilities, measurement processes, observations and deployments. This article describes the SSN ontology. It further gives an example and describes the use of the ontology in recent research projects.

OBSERVER: An Approach for Query Processing in Global Information Systems Based on Interoperation Across Pre-Existing Ontologies

There has been an explosion in the types, availability and volume of data accessible in an information system, thanks to the World Wide Web (the Web) and related inter-networking technologies. In this environment, there is a critical need to replace or complement earlier database integration approaches and current browsing and keyword-based techniques with concept-based approaches. Ontologies are increasingly becoming accepted as an important part of any concept or semantics based solution, and there is increasing realization that any viable solution will need to support multiple ontologies that may be independently developed and managed. In particular, we consider the use of concepts from pre-existing real world domain ontologies for describing the content of the underlying data repositories. The most challenging issue in this approach is that of vocabulary sharing, which involves dealing with the use of different terms or concepts to describe similar information. In this paper, we describe the architecture, design and implementation of the OBSERVER system. Brokering across the domain ontologies is enabled by representing and utilizing interontology relationships such as (but not limited to) synonyms, hyponyms and hypernyms across terms in different ontologies. User queries are rewritten by using these relationships to obtain translations across ontologies. Well established metrics like precision and recall based on the extensions underlying the concepts are used to estimate the loss of information, if any.

Semantic Sensor Web

Sensors are distributed across the globe leading to an avalanche of data about our environment. It is possible today to utilize networks of sensors to detect and identify a multitude of observations, from simple phenomena to complex events and situations. The lack of integration and communication between these networks, however, often isolates important data streams and intensifies the existing problem of too much data and not enough knowledge. With a view to addressing this problem, the semantic sensor Web (SSW) proposes that sensor data be annotated with semantic metadata that will both increase interoperability and provide contextual information essential for situational knowledge.

Meteor-s web service annotation framework

The World Wide Web is emerging not only as an infrastructure for data, but also for a broader variety of resources that are increasingly being made available as Web services. Relevant current standards like UDDI, WSDL, and SOAP are in their fledgling years and form the basis of making Web services a workable and broadly adopted technology. However, realizing the fuller scope of the promise of Web services and associated service oriented architecture will requite further technological advances in the areas of service interoperation, service discovery, service composition, and process orchestration. Semantics, especially as supported by the use of ontologies, and related Semantic Web technologies, are likely to provide better qualitative and scalable solutions to these requirements. Just as semantic annotation of data in the Semantic Web is the first critical step to better search, integration and analytics over heterogeneous data, semantic annotation of Web services is an equally critical first step to achieving the above promise. Our approach is to work with existing Web services technologies and combine them with ideas from the Semantic Web to create a better framework for Web service discovery and composition. In this paper we present MWSAF (METEOR-S Web Service Annotation Framework), a framework for semi-automatically marking up Web service descriptions with ontologies. We have developed algorithms to match and annotate WSDL files with relevant ontologies. We use domain ontologies to categorize Web services into domains. An empirical study of our approach is presented to help evaluate its performance.

Changing Focus on Interoperability in Information Systems:From System, Syntax, Structure to Semantics

Interoperability has been a basic requirement for the modern information systems environment for over two decades. How have key requirements for interoperability changed over that time? How can we understand the full scope of interoperability issues? What has shaped research on information system interoperability? What key progress has been made? This chapter provides some of the answers to these questions. In particular, it looks at different levels of information system interoperability, while reviewing the changing focus of interoperability research themes, past achievements and new challenges in the emerging global information infrastructure (GII). It divides the research into three generations, and discusses some of achievements of the past. Finally, as we move from managing data to information, and in future knowledge, the need for achieving semantic interoperability is discussed and key components of solutions are introduced.

Semantic and schematic similarities between database objects: a context-based approach

Abstract. In a multidatabase system, schematic conflicts between two objects are usually of interest only when the objects have some semantic similarity. We use the concept of semantic proximity, which is essentially an abstraction/mapping between the domains of the two objects associated with the context of comparison. An explicit though partial context representation is proposed and the specificity relationship between contexts is defined. The contexts are organized as a meet semi-lattice and associated operations like the greatest lower bound are defined. The context of comparison and the type of abstractions used to relate the two objects form the basis of a semantic taxonomy. At the semantic level, the intensional description of database objects provided by the context is expressed using description logics. The terms used to construct the contexts are obtained from {\em domain-specific ontologies}. Schema correspondences are used to store mappings from the semantic level to the data level and are associated with the respective contexts. Inferences about database content at the federation level are modeled as changes in the context and the associated schema correspondences. We try to reconcile the dual (schematic and semantic) perspectives by enumerating possible semantic similarities between objects having schema and data conflicts, and modeling schema correspondences as the projection of semantic proximity with respect to (wrt) context.

Semantic E-Workflow Composition

Systems and infrastructures are currently being developed to support Web services. The main idea is to encapsulate an organizations functionality within an appropriate interface and advertise it as Web services. While in some cases Web services may be utilized in an isolated form, it is normal to expect Web services to be integrated as part of workflow processes. The composition of workflow processes that model e-service applications differs from the design of traditional workflows, in terms of the number of tasks (Web services) available to the composition process, in their heterogeneity, and in their autonomy. Therefore, two problems need to be solved: how to efficiently discover Web services—based on functional and operational requirements—and how to facilitate the interoperability of heterogeneous Web services. In this paper, we present a solution within the context of the emerging Semantic Web that includes use of ontologies to overcome some of the problem. We describe a prototype that has been implemented to illustrate how discovery and interoperability functions are achieved more efficiently.

The Semantic Web - ISWC 2008

Research Track.- Involving Domain Experts in Authoring OWL Ontologies.- Supporting Collaborative Ontology Development in Protege.- Identifying Potentially Important Concepts and Relations in an Ontology.- RoundTrip Ontology Authoring.- nSPARQL: A Navigational Language for RDF.- An Experimental Comparison of RDF Data Management Approaches in a SPARQL Benchmark Scenario.- Anytime Query Answering in RDF through Evolutionary Algorithms.- The Expressive Power of SPARQL.- Integrating Object-Oriented and Ontological Representations: A Case Study in Java and OWL.- Extracting Semantic Constraint from Description Text for Semantic Web Service Discovery.- Enhancing Semantic Web Services with Inheritance.- Using Semantic Distances for Reasoning with Inconsistent Ontologies.- Statistical Learning for Inductive Query Answering on OWL Ontologies.- Optimization and Evaluation of Reasoning in Probabilistic Description Logic: Towards a Systematic Approach.- Modeling Documents by Combining Semantic Concepts with Unsupervised Statistical Learning.- Comparison between Ontology Distances (Preliminary Results).- Folksonomy-Based Collabulary Learning.- Combining a DL Reasoner and a Rule Engine for Improving Entailment-Based OWL Reasoning.- Improving an RCC-Derived Geospatial Approximation by OWL Axioms.- OWL Datatypes: Design and Implementation.- Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL.- Learning Concept Mappings from Instance Similarity.- Instanced-Based Mapping between Thesauri and Folksonomies.- Collecting Community-Based Mappings in an Ontology Repository.- Algebras of Ontology Alignment Relations.- Scalable Grounded Conjunctive Query Evaluation over Large and Expressive Knowledge Bases.- A Kernel Revision Operator for Terminologies - Algorithms and Evaluation.- Description Logic Reasoning with Decision Diagrams.- RDF123: From Spreadsheets to RDF.- Evaluating Long-Term Use of the Gnowsis Semantic Desktop for PIM.- Bringing the IPTC News Architecture into the Semantic Web.- RDFS Reasoning and Query Answering on Top of DHTs.- An Interface-Based Ontology Modularization Framework for Knowledge Encapsulation.- On the Semantics of Trust and Caching in the Semantic Web.- Semantic Web Service Choreography: Contracting and Enactment.- Formal Model for Semantic-Driven Service Execution.- Efficient Semantic Web Service Discovery in Centralized and P2P Environments.- Exploring Semantic Social Networks Using Virtual Reality.- Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems.- Semantic Modelling of User Interests Based on Cross-Folksonomy Analysis.- ELP: Tractable Rules for OWL 2.- Term Dependence on the Semantic Web.- Semantic Relatedness Measure Using Object Properties in an Ontology.- Semantic Web in Use Track.- Thesaurus-Based Search in Large Heterogeneous Collections.- Deploying Semantic Web Technologies for Work Integrated Learning in Industry - A Comparison: SME vs. Large Sized Company.- Creating and Using Organisational Semantic Webs in Large Networked Organisations.- An Architecture for Semantic Navigation and Reasoning with Patient Data - Experiences of the Health-e-Child Project.- Requirements Analysis Tool: A Tool for Automatically Analyzing Software Requirements Documents.- OntoNaviERP: Ontology-Supported Navigation in ERP Software Documentation.- Market Blended Insight: Modeling Propensity to Buy with the Semantic Web.- DogOnt - Ontology Modeling for Intelligent Domotic Environments.- Introducing IYOUIT.- A Semantic Data Grid for Satellite Mission Quality Analysis.- A Process Catalog for Workflow Generation.- Inference Web in Action: Lightweight Use of the Proof Markup Language.- Supporting Ontology-Based Dynamic Property and Classification in WebSphere Metadata Server.- Towards a Multimedia Content Marketplace Implementation Based on Triplespaces.- Doctoral Consortium Track.- Semantic Enrichment of Folksonomy Tagspaces.- Contracting and Copyright Issues for Composite Semantic Services.- Parallel Computation Techniques for Ontology Reasoning.- Towards Semantic Mapping for Casual Web Users.- Interactive Exploration of Heterogeneous Cultural Heritage Collections.- End-User Assisted Ontology Evolution in Uncertain Domains.- Learning Methods in Multi-grained Query Answering.