MANAGING VIRTUAL ORGANIZATION PROCESSES BY SEMANTIC WEB ONTOLOGIES

Abstract

Interoperability within Virtual Organisations (VOs) is still only weakly supported by IT frameworks. Whilst service level interoperability has made remarkable progress since the emergence and the rapid growth of SOA and Grid technology in the last years, business processes – which are the driving force of each VO – still suffer distinct conceptual gaps regarding their decomposition to technical transactions. There exists no detailed approach that would allow describing technical as well as business aspects in a coherent yet flexible and extensible way. This paper presents a newly developed semantic framework that targets this requirement. The conceptual background is followed by an introduction of the developed semantic web ontologies. Based on these definitions, dedicated Ontology Services as well as a set of related end-user applications facilitating semantic technology have been designed and implemented. They are presented in the second part of the paper. Reported are results from the EU project InteliGrid (IST-004664; 2004-2007).