Carlos Pedrinaci

IRS-III: A broker-based approach to semantic Web services

A factor limiting the take up of Web services is that all tasks associated with the creation of an application, for example, finding, composing, and resolving mismatches between Web services have to be carried out by a software developer. Semantic Web services is a combination of semantic Web and Web service technologies that promise to alleviate these problems. In this paper we describe IRS-III, a framework for creating and executing semantic Web services, which takes a semantic broker-based approach to mediating between service requesters and service providers. We describe the overall approach and the components of IRS-III from an ontological and architectural viewpoint. We then illustrate our approach through an application in the eGovernment domain.

An outlook on semantic business process mining and monitoring

Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) has been proposed as an extension of BPM with Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services (SWS) technologies in order to increase and enhance the level of automation that can be achieved within the BPM life-cycle. In a nutshell, SBPM is based on the extensive and exhaustive conceptualization of the BPM domain so as to support reasoning during business processes modelling, composition, execution, and analysis, leading to important enhancements throughout the life-cycle of business processes. An important step of the BPM life-cycle is the analysis of the processes deployed in companies. This analysis provides feedback about how these processes are actually being executed (like common control-flow paths, performance measures, detection of bottlenecks, alert to approaching deadlines, auditing, etc). The use of semantic information can lead to dramatic enhancements in the state-of-the-art in analysis techniques. In this paper we present an outlook on the opportunities and challenges on semantic business process mining and monitoring, thus paving the way for the implementation of the next generation of BPM analysis tools.

A core ontology for business process analysis

Business Process Management (BPM) aims at supporting the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and maintain business processes in organisations. An important step of the BPM life-cycle is the analysis of the processes deployed in companies. However, the degree of automation currently achieved cannot support the level of adaptation required by businesses. Initial steps have been performed towards including some sort of automated reasoning within Business Process Analysis (BPA) but this is typically limited to using taxonomies. We present a core ontology aimed at enhancing the state of the art in BPA. The ontology builds upon a Time Ontology and is structured around the process, resource, and object perspectives as typically adopted when analysing business processes. The ontology has been extended and validated by means of an Events Ontology and an Events Analysis Ontology aimed at capturing the audit trails generated by Process-Aware Information Systems and deriving additional knowledge.

IRS-III: a broker for semantic web services based applications

In this paper we describe IRS-III which takes a semantic broker based approach to creating applications from Semantic Web Services by mediating between a service requester and one or more service providers. Business organisations can view Semantic Web Services as the basic mechanism for integrating data and processes across applications on the Web. This paper extends previous publications on IRS by providing an overall description of our framework from the point of view of application development. More specifically, we describe the IRS-III methodology for building applications using Semantic Web Services and illustrate our approach through a use case on e-government.

Semantic Business Process Management: Scaling Up the Management of Business Processes

Business process management (BPM) aims at supporting the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and maintain business processes in organisations. Despite its success however, BPM suffers from a lack of automation that would support a smooth transition between the business world and the IT world. We argue that semantic BPM, that is, the enhancement of BPM with semantic Web services technologies, provides further scalability to BPM by increasing the level of automation that can be achieved. We describe the particular SBPM approach developed within the SUPER project and we illustrate how it contributes to enhancing existing BPM solutions in order to achieve more flexible, dynamic and manageable business processes.

Linked USDL: A Vocabulary for Web-Scale Service Trading

Real-world services ranging from cloud solutions to consulting currently dominate economic activity. Yet, despite the increasing number of service marketplaces online, service trading on the Web remains highly restricted. Services are at best traded within closed silos that offer mainly manual search and comparison capabilities through a Web storefront. Thus, it is seldom possible to automate the customisation, bundling, and trading of services, which would foster a more efficient and effective service sector. In this paper we present Linked USDL, a comprehensive vocabulary for capturing and sharing rich service descriptions, which aims to support the trading of services over the Web in an open, scalable, and highly automated manner. The vocabulary adopts and exploits Linked Data as a means to efficiently support communication over the Web, to promote and simplify its adoption by reusing vocabularies and datasets, and to enable the opportunistic engagement of multiple cross-domain providers.

Using Linked Data to Annotate and Search Educational Video Resources for Supporting Distance Learning

Multimedia educational resources play an important role in education, particularly for distance learning environments. With the rapid growth of the multimedia web, large numbers of educational video resources are increasingly being created by several different organizations. It is crucial to explore, share, reuse, and link these educational resources for better e-learning experiences. Most of the video resources are currently annotated in an isolated way, which means that they lack semantic connections. Thus, providing the facilities for annotating these video resources is highly demanded. These facilities create the semantic connections among video resources and allow their metadata to be understood globally. Adopting Linked Data technology, this paper introduces a video annotation and browser platform with two online tools: Annomation and SugarTube. Annomation enables users to semantically annotate video resources using vocabularies defined in the Linked Data cloud. SugarTube allows users to browse semantically linked educational video resources with enhanced web information from different online resources. In the prototype development, the platform uses existing video resources for the history courses from the Open University (United Kingdom). The result of the initial development demonstrates the benefits of applying Linked Data technology in the aspects of reusability, scalability, and extensibility.

Adapting SAWSDL for Semantic Annotations of RESTful Services

RESTful services are increasingly been adopted as a suitable lightweight solution for creating service-based applications on the Web. However, most often these services lack any machine-processable description and therefore a significant human labour has to be devoted to locating existing services, understanding their documentation, and implementing software that uses them. In order to increase the automation of these tasks, we present an integrated lightweight approach for the creation of semantic RESTful service descriptions. Our work is based on hRESTS, a microformat for including machine-readable descriptions of RESTful service within existing HTML service documentation. We complement hRESTS by the MicroWSMO microformat, which uses SAWSDL-like hooks to add semantic annotations. Finally, we present SWEET---Semantic Web sErvices Editing Tool---which effectively supports users in creating semantic descriptions of RESTful services based on the aforementioned technologies.

SENTINEL: a semantic business process monitoring tool

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) aims to support the real-time analysis of business processes in order to improve the speed and effectiveness of business operations. Providing a timely, integrated high-level view on the evolution and well-being of business activities within enterprises constitutes a highly valuable analytical tool for monitoring, managing and hopefully enhancing businesses. However, the degree of automation currently achieved cannot support the level of reactivity and adaptation demanded by businesses. We argue that the fundamental problem is that moving between the business level and the IT level is insufficiently automated and suggest an extensive use of semantic technologies as a solution. In particular, we present SENTINEL a Semantic Business Process Monitoring tool that advances the state of the art in BAM by making extensive use of semantic technologies in order to support the integration and derivation of business level knowledge out of low-level audit trails generated by IT systems.

An Integrated Semantic Web Service Discovery and Composition Framework

In this paper we present a theoretical analysis of graph-based service composition in terms of its dependency with service discovery. Driven by this analysis we define a composition framework by means of integration with fine-grained I/O service discovery that enables the generation of a graph-based composition which contains the set of services that are semantically relevant for an input-output request. The proposed framework also includes an optimal composition search algorithm to extract the best composition from the graph minimising the length and the number of services, and different graph optimisations to improve the scalability of the system. A practical implementation used for the empirical analysis is also provided. This analysis proves the scalability and flexibility of our proposal and provides insights on how integrated composition systems can be designed in order to achieve good performance in real scenarios for the web.