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As coordination is a central issue in Inter-Organizational Workflow (IOW), it is quite natural to model it as a specific entity. Moreover, the structure of the different IOW coordination problems is amenable to protocols. Hence, this paper show how these protocols could be modelled and made accessible to partners involved in an IOW. More precisely, the paper proposes a coordination protocol ontology for IOW and explains how workflow partners can dynamically select them. This solution eases the design and development of IOW systems by providing autonomous, reusable and extendable coordination components. This solution also supports semantic coordination through the use of the protocol ontology, and by making protocols shared resources exploitable in both design and execution steps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with Workflow Web Services (W2S). By W2S, we mean services automating business processes, and whose description and execution are accessible through the Web. In a first step, we use the Petri Net with Objects (PNO) formalism to graphically and formally model W2S, and then, in a second step, we provide rules to derive OWL-S specifications from PNO specifications automatically. The two main advantages of our approach are, first, to ease the design, the simulation and the verification of a workflow service thanks to PNO, and second, to publish it thanks to OWL-S, which is a semantic Web service description language. Consequently, PNO can be seen as a formalism providing an operational semantic to OWL-S since it defines formal and executable specifications to analyze, simulate, check and validate OWL-S specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with Web Workflow Services (W2S) description languages that help organizations to find partners in the context of loose Inter-Organizational Workflow (IOW). Loose IOW refers to occasional cooperation between organizations, free of structural constraints, where the partners involved and their number are not pre-defined. Such a dynamic and heterogeneous context requires the definition of a W2S description language allowing workflow service providers to publish their capabilities and workflow service requesters to express their needs. Current Web services languages do not permit to describe adequately workflow services (structure and behavior) by lack of expressive power and/or formal semantics. In this paper, we show how the appropriate combination of Petri Nets with Objects (PNO) and OWL-S allows the specification, validation and publication of workflow services. On the one hand, PNOs permit the formal and graphical specification of workflow services, their simulation and validation. On the other hand, OWL-S permits the publication of workflow services on the Web. OWL-S has also the advantage to include the ontology concept which can be used to solve semantic problems between IOW partners. Moreover, we provide rules and algorithms which automatically derive OWL-S specifications from PNOs ones. This work has been implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an interface for querying databases integrating versions (DBiV). This interface gives a representation of the database schema as a graph of nodes and links and defines a graphic language for both querying versions and objects living together in the database. Expressing a query consists in selecting links and performing operations from nodes of the graph. The graphically performed operations are algebraic functions. This interface is intended for casual users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]