Verification of Semantically-Enhanced Artifact Systems (Extended Version)
This work addresses the need for higher-level abstraction and verification in business process modeling, representing an incremental enhancement to existing GSM frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of verifying temporal properties in artifact-centric systems by enhancing the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) approach with a semantic layer using OWL 2 QL ontologies and mapping specifications, resulting in a tool that exploits ontology-based data access and GSMC model checking for verification.
Artifact-Centric systems have emerged in the last years as a suitable framework to model business-relevant entities, by combining their static and dynamic aspects. In particular, the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) approach has been recently proposed to model artifacts and their lifecycle in a declarative way. In this paper, we enhance GSM with a Semantic Layer, constituted by a full-fledged OWL 2 QL ontology linked to the artifact information models through mapping specifications. The ontology provides a conceptual view of the domain under study, and allows one to understand the evolution of the artifact system at a higher level of abstraction. In this setting, we present a technique to specify temporal properties expressed over the Semantic Layer, and verify them according to the evolution in the underlying GSM model. This technique has been implemented in a tool that exploits state-of-the-art ontology-based data access technologies to manipulate the temporal properties according to the ontology and the mappings, and that relies on the GSMC model checker for verification.