Workflow Semantic Description for Inter-organizational Cooperation

The work we present here is in line with a novel approach for interorganizational workflow cooperation that consists of workflow advertisement, interconnection, and cooperation. For advertisement, workflows should be described. Nevertheless, by using a description language like XPDL only syntactic problems can be solved. In this paper, we propose a three steps method for workflows semantic description. First, workflows described using XPDL, are annotated to distinguish cooperative activities and non cooperative ones. Second, to preserve privacy, a view, that we call cooperative interface, for each different partner is generated. Third, cooperative interfaces are described using OWL according to an ontology we have defined for cooperative workflows.