Context-aware Process Support through Automatic Selection and Invocation of Semantic Web Services

Current technologies aimed at supporting processes - whether it is a business process or a learning process - are usually based on using a dedicated set of metadata to describe a process which refers to some specific data, used in the process. Process metadata is usually specific to a standard specification - like the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) or the IMS Learning Design Standard - while used process data is specific to a specific process context. These facts limit the re-usability of a process model across different standards and contexts. To overcome these issues, this paper describes an innovative semantic web service-oriented architecture aimed at changing this data- and metadata-based paradigm to a highly dynamic service-oriented approach following the idea of a semantic abstraction from process metadata as well as process data. This approach enables a dynamic adaptation to specific actor needs and objectives and supports the development of abstract semantic process models which are re-usable across different contexts and standards. To illustrate the application of our approach, we describe a prototypical application to the domain of E-Learning.