Title: Knowledge management for designing business workflows through semantic compositions of web services

Authors: Stefano Valtolina; Barbara Rita Barricelli; Fabio Ariano; Marco Padula; Paolo Luigi Scala

Addresses: Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Comelico 39/41, Milano 20135, Italy. ' Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Comelico 39/41, Milano 20135, Italy. ' Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Comelico 39/41, Milano 20135, Italy. ' Istituto per le Tecnologie della Costruzione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via Bassini 15, Milano 20133, Italy. ' Istituto per le Tecnologie della Costruzione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via Bassini 15, Milano 20133, Italy

Abstract: This paper presents a workflow management system called task management system (TMS) devoted to help end users to combine and integrate distributed tasks through visual composition strategies. The TMS is devoted to support human resources in performing their working activities and in exploiting their knowledge and expertise. The TMS network allows employees, who are experts of a specific domain, to design a workflow, to visually validate its execution and to execute it at use time. In particular, the paper describes how workflow designers use TMS to transform the task analysis documents prepared by domain experts into a description of the workflow. The retrieved components are web services that are available in remote or local repositories representing distributed knowledge bases of business tasks. The TMS offers transparent invocation methods for invoking services by means of a semantic discovery engine designed for exploiting a taxonomy of web services.

Keywords: knowledge management; web services; workflow design; semantic orchestration; visual interactive systems; visual composition; business workflows; distributed tasks; semantic discovery.

DOI: 10.1504/IJKL.2012.047547

International Journal of Knowledge and Learning, 2012 Vol.8 No.1/2, pp.62 - 85

Received: 02 May 2011
Accepted: 27 Sep 2011
Published online: 02 Sep 2014 *

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