An approach to business process registration for enterprise collaboration: using BPEL as an example

Abstract

To facilitate business collaboration and interoperation among enterprises, it is critical to discover and reuse appropriate business processes modelled in different languages and stored in different repositories. Therefore, it is a challenge to register them in a unified manner without changing their original representations and semantics. This paper proposes a reference metamodel for process model registration (PMR) to register selected metadata and semantics of heterogeneous business processes. PMR is mainly designed to register business process automatically, facilitate the semantic discovery of business processes across enterprises, and promote process interoperation and business collaboration. Considering the popularity of BPEL in business process description, our approach takes BPEL as an example to illustrate how to specify the mappings from BPEL to PMR when performing PMR-based registration of business processes in a specific modelling language. Finally, a prototype of web-based business process registration tool named PMRegister is developed to demonstrate the feasibility and capability of our approach.