Model-driven design and development of semantic Web service applications

This article proposes a model-driven methodology to design and develop semantic Web service applications and their components, described according to the emerging WSMO standard. In particular, we show that business processes and Web engineering models have sufficient expressive power to support the semiautomatic extraction of semantic descriptions (i.e., WSMO ontologies, goals, Web services, and mediators), thus partially hiding the complexity of dealing with semantics. Our method is based on existing models for the specification of business processes (BPMN) combined with Web engineering models for designing and developing semantically rich Web applications (WebML). The proposed approach leads from an abstract view of the business needs to a concrete implementation of the application by means of several design steps; high-level models are transformed into software components. Our framework increases the efficiency of the whole design process, yielding to the construction of semantic Web service applications spanning over several enterprises.