Semi-automatic Acquisition of Semantic Descriptions of Processes in the Web

Most of today´s business processes are complex and consist of more than one party or single step procedures. In the Web, this is reflected by the existence of billions of Web sites, which may be regarded as complex processes, and on the other side only a few thousands of publicly available WSDL files that present single services. The availability of semantic descriptions of services and processes in the Web facilitates their discovery, as well as their composition into more complex workflows. It also facilitates the automatic execution of such workflows despite their heterogeneity. However, the deficit of semantic descriptions of Web processes deprives the users from using such sophisticated automatic techniques. The scope of our research is to fill this gap by providing semiautomatic techniques for the acquisition of a large number of semantic process descriptions on the (deep) Web. We model the data found in the online sources using ontologies, mine the process a user follows through the Web forms and generate a semantic description of this process. We present in this paper the implementation of our algorithms for the acquisition of process descriptions. We also provide a Web-based editor for manual annotation of new processes and refinement of the automatically-generated descriptions.