Title: An approach to business process registration for enterprise collaboration: using BPEL as an example

Authors: Chong Wang; Zhong Luo; Xiuwei Zhang; Keqing He; Xu Chen

Addresses: State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering, School of Computer, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China ' Science and Research Department, Naval University of Engineering, Wuhan, Hubei, China ' State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering, School of Computer, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China ' State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering, School of Computer, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China ' State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering, School of Computer, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China

Abstract: To facilitate business collaboration and interoperation among enterprises, it is critical to discover and reuse appropriate business processes modelled in different languages and stored in different repositories. Therefore, it is a challenge to register them in a unified manner without changing their original representations and semantics. This paper proposes a reference metamodel for process model registration (PMR) to register selected metadata and semantics of heterogeneous business processes. PMR is mainly designed to register business process automatically, facilitate the semantic discovery of business processes across enterprises, and promote process interoperation and business collaboration. Considering the popularity of BPEL in business process description, our approach takes BPEL as an example to illustrate how to specify the mappings from BPEL to PMR when performing PMR-based registration of business processes in a specific modelling language. Finally, a prototype of web-based business process registration tool named PMRegister is developed to demonstrate the feasibility and capability of our approach.

Keywords: business process registration; enterprise collaboration; BPEL; metamodelling; process discovery; business collaboration; interoperability; business processes modelling; metadata; semantics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPIM.2015.071256

International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2015 Vol.7 No.3, pp.181 - 196

Received: 29 Jan 2014
Accepted: 17 Nov 2014
Published online: 18 Aug 2015 *

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