Ensuring the Semantic Correctness of Workflow Processes: An Ontological Approach

Workflow verification has been known as an important as-pect of workflow management systems. Many existing approaches con-centrate on ensuring the correctness of workflow processes at the syntac-tic level. However, these approaches are not sufficient to detect errors at the semantic level. This paper contributes to ensure the semantic cor-rectness of workflow processes. First, we propose a formal definition of semantic constraints and an O(n 3)-time algorithm for detecting redun-dant and conflicting constraints. Second, by relying on the CPN Ontology (a representation of Coloured Petri Nets with OWL DL ontology) and sets of semantic constraints, workflow processes are semantically created. And third, we show how to check the semantic correctness of workflow processes with the SPARQL query language.