Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is being adopted as one of the industry standards for modeling cross-organizational business processes (CBPs). BPMN analyzes a business process as a set of interrelated activities, focusing primarily on the functional perspective of the process. However, for successful CBP modeling, an informational perspective is important. Although BPMN 2.0 supports information flow design, existing representations of data/information elements are not sufficient to support CBP modeling requirements. In this light, the paper proposes an approach for formal modeling and specification of information requirements used and generated in the CBPs. A UML View Profile is introduced to specify information requirements as views over the common reference ontology. A BPMN 2.0 extension is introduced to connect the defined views and the corresponding process activities. Ultimately, the proposed information requirements specification enables generation of the message instance and its transformation at the implementation level.

This paper investigates the potential of the Semantic Web technologies to support a semantic-based Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) standards architecture. We give detailed information of the support that these technologies and the underlying Description Logics (DL) formalism provide for the integration task. Our main aim is to assess the potential impact of these emerging technologies on industrial interoperability efforts. In addition to that effect, we plan to use this advanced EAI standards architecture as an experimental framework in which the Semantic Web technologies are evaluated on realistic enterprise integration problems. We illustrate novel capabilities beyond the existing syntactic integration approaches when managing multiple enterprise ontologies derived from a common ontology.

Large industrial interoperability projects use syntax-based Enterprise Application Integration standards, such as XML Schema, to accomplish interoperable data exchange among enterprise applications. In this paper, we describe an approach to assess the potential impact of Semantic Web technologies on these standards and on testability of integration results when using these standards. The experimental approach includes an automated translation of an XML Schema-based representation of business document content models into an OWL-based ontology. Based on this ontology, we use the Semantic Web representation and reasoning mechanisms to validate ontological constructs and constraints in support of data exchange. We demonstrate novel model-based integration capabilities that go beyond the existing syntax-based approaches. These new capabilities are relevant when managing multiple enterprise ontologies derived from a common ontology.