© The ATHENA Consortium. CI3 - Practices of Interoperability in SMEs Proposed Solutions

2 © The ATHENA Consortium. Proposed Solutions The approach adopted for developing interoperability is: First identify barriers to interoperability in SMEs Then identify solutions which allow removing those barriers

3 © The ATHENA Consortium. Business Process Configuration Proposed Solutions: 1.Business Process Configuration 2.Service Granularity and Behaviour 3.Data Exchange 4.Process Model Exchange 5.Process/Interface Adaptation

4 © The ATHENA Consortium. Business Process Configuration Verification The approach enables automatic discovery of all parts of a business process that do not satisfy a predefined business requirement Verification of the business process configuration is realized using formal methods These methods seek to establish a logical proof that a system works correctly

5 © The ATHENA Consortium. Conceptual solution for business verification Business Requirements Business Process Declarative Rules Semantic Business Process Model Inference Engine Result of the Verification 1 1. Define a formal description of the business process 2 2. Express the business requirements according to the terms defined in the formal upper ontology 3 3. Store the specific business process description as a semantic business process model 4 4. Use an Inference Engine to infer whether the current configuration violates the existing set of the given rules Business Process Ontology

6 © The ATHENA Consortium. Technical solution for business verification 1. OWL-DL is used as language for definition of the upper ontology 2. A modeling tool is used to create SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) Statements as constraints representing the business requirements 3. Business Process is modeled using Maestro and stored as an OWL-DL instance of the upper ontology 4. KAON2 is the inference engine used to infer whether a selected business process violates the set of rules assigned to that business process or not Business Requirements Business Process Business Process Ontology Declarative Rules Semantic Business Process Model Inference Engine Result of the Verification

7 © The ATHENA Consortium. To know more About…Athena courses OntologiesONT1- Introduction to Semantics Maestro ToolEM4 - Cross-Organizational Business Processes – Enabling Technologies and Tools Other OWL-DLhttp:// KAON2http://kaon2.semanticweb.org/

8 © The ATHENA Consortium. Service Granularity and Behaviour Proposed Solutions: 1.Business Process Configuration 2.Service Granularity and Behaviour 3.Data Exchange 4.Process Model Exchange 5.Process/Interface Adaptation

9 © The ATHENA Consortium. Service Granularity and Behaviour: Conceptual solution Shipper 1 Middleware Architecture Shipper 2 Shipper n UPS FedEx Other

10 © The ATHENA Consortium. Service Granularity and Behaviour: Technologies Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is an XML formatted language used to describe a Web services Johnson is a Web service execution infrastructure Lyndon is an application that represents the design- time counterpart of the Johnson tool

11 © The ATHENA Consortium. Service Granularity and Behaviour: Technical solution ServiceSelection.wsdl RateCalculation.wsdl Shipping.wsdl Shipper 1 Shipper 2 Shipper n UPS FedEx Other Lyndon Johnson SOAP - REST

12 © The ATHENA Consortium. Data Exchange Proposed Solutions: 1.Business Process Configuration 2.Service Granularity and Behaviour 3.Data Exchange 4.Process Model Exchange 5.Process/Interface Adaptation

13 © The ATHENA Consortium. Data Exchange Data Exchange can have some barriers like: Wrong Instantiation of Data Models Different Data Restriction Incompatible Syntactic/Semantic Representation of Data

14 © The ATHENA Consortium. Wrong Instantiation of Data Models: Conceptual Solution To solve the wrong instantiation of data models the conformance testing should be applied The conformance testing is based in two different stages: Model validation and Semantic validation To allow the verification of errors in all the data exchanged, the conformance test uses the data model like base to both validations

15 © The ATHENA Consortium. Wrong Instantiation of Data Models: Technical Solution Application Engine Application Engine Interface XSD Model Schematron Rules Knowledge Base Conformance Test Service Execute Test Result Client Application

16 © The ATHENA Consortium. Different Data Restriction To identify this problem, the conformance testing (described in previous solution) can be applied, because the conformance testing can also check restriction

17 © The ATHENA Consortium. Incompatible Syntactic and Semantic Representation of Data (Solution 1) The first solution is to create a mapping of schemas of the companies, that want to exchange data, and then build a reference ontology Reference Ontology Model A Model B Schema Mapping

18 © The ATHENA Consortium. Incompatible Syntactic and Semantic Representation of Data (Solution 2) The second solution is generate a mapping between a message to Service A and a message to Service B Based on this mapping, the values sent to A can be extracted and inserted into the corresponding tags for B Message to Service AMessage to Service B

19 © The ATHENA Consortium. Process Model Exchange Proposed Solutions: 1.Business Process Configuration 2.Service Granularity and Behaviour 3.Data Exchange 4.Process Model Exchange 5.Process/Interface Adaptation

20 © The ATHENA Consortium. Process Model Exchange: Conceptual Solution There is a great number of process model languages. Enterprises should often exchange process models The approach is to offer a model exchange mechanism based on a common format that contains a set of basic modelling constructs

21 © The ATHENA Consortium. Process Model Exchange: Technical Solution The exchange mechanism mentioned is the POP* and consists of a meta-model together with guidelines and scenarios for its management and use

22 © The ATHENA Consortium. To know more About…Athena courses POP*EM1- Enterprise Modelling as a way to achieve Interoperability

23 © The ATHENA Consortium. Process/Interface Adaptation Proposed Solutions: 1.Business Process Configuration 2.Service Granularity and Behaviour 3.Data Exchange 4.Process Model Exchange 5.Process/Interface Adaptation

24 © The ATHENA Consortium. Process/Interface Adaptation: Conceptual Solution This barrier arises when a partner has to be integrated into a collaborative process The solution should facilitate the transformation from a process engineering level to an execution level

25 © The ATHENA Consortium. Process/Interface Adaptation: Technical Solution PIM4SOA can be seen as a metamodel which facilitates the transformation from a process engineering level to an execution level Business expert IT infrastructure GAP

28 © The ATHENA Consortium. This course has been developed under the funding of the EC with the support of the EC ATHENA-IP Project. Disclaimer and Copyright Notice: Permission is granted without fee for personal or educational (non-profit) use, previous notification is needed. For notification purposes, please, address to the ATHENA Training Programme Chair at In other cases please, contact at the same e_mail address for use conditions. Some of the figures presented in this course are freely inspired by others reported in referenced works/sources. For such figures copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the original authors or by other copyright holders. It is understood that all persons copying these figures will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each copyright