A Semantic Service-Oriented Architecture for Business Process Fusion

Abstract

Most enterprises contain several heterogeneous systems, creating a fuzzy network of interconnected applications, services, and data sources. In this emerging business context, a clear need appears to link these former incompatible systems by using enterprise application integration (EAI) solutions. We propose a semantically enriched service-oriented business applications (SE-SOBA) framework that will provide a dynamically reconfigurable architecture enabling enterprises to respond quickly and flexibly to market changes. We also propose the development of a pure semantic-based implementation of the universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI) specification, called pure semantic registry (PSR), which provides a flexible, extendable core architectural component allowing the deployment and business exploitation of Semantic Web services. The implementation of PSR involves the development of a semantic-based repository and an embedded resource definition framework (RDF)-based reasoning engine, providing strong query and inference capabilities to support effective service discovery and composition. We claim that when SE-SOBAs are combined with PSR and rule-based formalizations of business scenarios and processes, they constitute a holistic business-driven semantic integration framework, called FUSION, applied to intra- and inter- organizational EAI scenarios.