Using ontologies for coordination in loose Inter-Organizational Workflow

This paper shows how it is possible to use ontologies to deal with coordination of workflow processes in loose inter-organizational workflow (IOW). The aim of IOW is to support the cooperation between distributed and heterogeneous business processes running in different autonomous organizations to reach a common goal, corresponding to a value-added service. Loose IOW refers to occasional cooperation, free of structural constraints, where the involved partners (organizations) and their number are not pre defined but rather dynamically selected at run-time. Coordination in loose IOW raises two specific problems, which are: (i) partners finding able to realize a workflow service (i.e. a service implementing a workflow process), and (ii) negotiation of workflow services between partners. This paper shows how two specific components introduced to deal with partners finding and negotiation between them use ontologies for automatically discovering workflow services and choosing protocols to negotiate workflow services.