Formal Semantics for Modeling Collaborative Business Processes Based on Interaction Protocols

Collaborative business processes (CBPs) are expected to conduct the behavior among organizations that participate in collaborative networks. Although languages for CBPs emerged from the industry and academic sides, not much effort has been put to add formal semantics to the constructs of the languages to reason on structural aspects of CBP models. In particular, the UP-ColBPIP language supports the modeling of collaborative business processes in terms of interaction protocols, which describes a choreography of business messages based on speech acts. This paper presents an approach to add formal semantics to the UP-ColBPIP language, by defining an OntoUML conceptual model of the constructs that allows modeling CBPs as interaction protocols. The formal semantics of the constructs of UP-ColBPIP enables the definition of design guidelines and the development of techniques for the structural analysis of CBP models represented in terms of interaction protocols. Finally, the work depicts an OWL ontology implementing the proposed conceptual model, with the purpose of answering queries about the messages based on speech acts as well as other structural aspects of CBP models.