Engineering semantic web services for government business processes automation

Abstract

Web Services (WS) technology does not allow automatic discovery and execution of services in the current distributed and complex business environments. Semantic Web Services (SWS) overcome this limitation by adding semantic descriptions to WS, enabling automatic discovery, selection, composition and execution of services for intelligent interoperable machine-to-machine interactions over the World Wide Web (WWW). These capabilities of SWS are useful in distributed environments such as that of e-government. On the other hand, existing SWS solutions assume the existence of dedicated service providers of WS to be semantically described. However, government operations and processes may require a certain amount of prior re-engineering (conceptualization, design, modeling, specification, etc.). This study proposed an infrastructure for Semantic Web Services-enabled e-government that integrates Business Process Modelling (BPM) and Semantic Annotation into existing SWS solutions as tools for the modeling and engineering of SWS for non-automated government operations and processes. The proposed infrastructure leverages SWS technology in e-government while enabling continuous re-engineering and automation of government processes. The study presents an example of the application of the proposed infrastructure with emphasis on the modeling and semantic annotation of business processes for SWS design