An Ontology-Based Conceptual Mapping Framework for Translating FBPML to the Web Services Ontology Gayathri Nadarajan and Yun-Heh Chen-Burger Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications (CISA) School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, U.K. G.Nadarajan@sms.ed.ac.uk, jessicac@inf.ed.ac.uk Abstract This paper presents an ontology-based conceptual map- ping framework that translates a formal and visually rich business process modeling (BPM) language, Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language (FBPML) to a Se- mantic Web-based language, the Web Services Ontology (OWL-S). The translation aims to narrow the gap between Enterprise Modelling methods and Semantic Web services, thus bringing the two communities closer. Another signif- icant contribution of the translation is that it allows more mature technologies such as BPM methods to be utilised within emerging fields that are constantly evolving, such as the Semantic Web. The framework is divided into a data model translation and a process model translation. An im- plementation and an evaluation of the process model trans- lation are demonstrated and discussed. 1. Introduction The need for more sophisticated Web-based support tools has become apparent with the fast advancement of the Web and the Semantic Web vision [3]. Business-to- Business (B2B) Electronic Commerce is fast becoming the most important application area of Semantic Web technol- ogy in terms of market volume [2]. Enterprise Modelling (EM) methods, on the other hand, are mature, established procedures that are commonly used as an analysis tool for describing and redesigning businesses by entrepreneurs. They have been well recognised for their value in provid- ing a more organised way to describe complex, informal domain [6]. For organisations with business goals, the automation of business processes as Web services is increasingly im- portant, especially with many business transactions taking place within the Web today. The existence of established EM methods, such as Business Process Modelling (BPM) methods, suggests that they could be exploited by emerg- ing technologies such as Semantic Web services to provide a more mature framework incorporating both business- and Web application-specific technologies. In a wider context this aims to bring business-oriented and technical-oriented communities closer in order to achieve common organisa- tional goals. 2. Background The Fundamental Business Process Modelling Lan- guage, FBPML [8] was designed to support today’s ever changing workflow environment that meets diversified re- quirements. It is an inherited, specialised and combined version of several standard modelling languages. In par- ticular, FBPML adapts and merges two established process languages; Process Specification Language (PSL) [16] and Integrated Definition Method (IDEF3) [11] by incorporat- ing the visual capabilities of IDEF3 and the formal seman- tics for process modelling concepts provided by PSL. The main aim of FBPML is to provide support for vir- tual organisations which are becoming more and more per- vasive with the advancement of Web technology and ser- vices. It ultimately seeks to provide distributed knowledge- and semantic-based manipulation and collaboration. Most importantly, people with different responsibilities and capa- bilities could work together to accomplish tasks and goals without technological or communication barriers caused by the differences in their roles. FBPML can express business processes in conventional first order predicate logic. It has two sections to provide theories and formal representations for describing data and processes; the Data Language and the Process Language. The FBPML Data Language (FBPML DL) [5] is first- ordered. The syntactic convention that has been used in Prolog has been adopted for its representation. It provides