A protocol ontology for inter-organizational workflow coordination

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.