Research Field "Semantic Technologies"
In the context of enterprise wide and cross enterprise workflows semantic technologies have a special relevance and importance. Adequate semantic descriptions of resources and workflows, general purpose as well as specialized for a number of different application domains, enable a lot of value-added characteristics and potentially affect all interoperability issues. Ontologies for the description in a formal and explicit way of Grid services make as automatic as possible the intelligent discovery of resources and services on the fly. The semantic representation of both functional and non-functional attributes of each services and workflow, together with inference rules, allows the (semi)-automatic composition and substitution of single services, or whole processes, within a workflow, thus enabling the exploitation of semantically equivalent, potentially more efficient composition of services and processes. There is a need for extensive work in this research area, in particular to support the design and deployment of ontologies. At the same time, tools and methodologies need to be developed so that emerging metadata and ontologies can be successfully and extensively applied.
Related Projects
BPMN
b_bprimal