OWL Model to Support Business Process and Web Services in SOA Environments

With the emergence of SOA (service oriented architecture), a business process can be realized as a Web service. A business process can be viewed as a requirement phase artifact and Web service can be viewed as a development phase artifact. By reducing the gap between a business process and Web service, we can extend the reusability, flexibility, and pursued business agility. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an ontology model for managing a business process and Web service effectively within a single meta-model. In addition, we propose an inference rule for the search and discovery of related Web services and business processes in our proposed ontology model. By using our proposed model, we can effectively manage business processes and Web services, decrease maintenance costs, and increase the productivity of system development process through the reuse of well-organized business processes and related Web services.