What is m3pe?

The m3pe project started in October 2004 and finished its planned duration in October 2007. The project was concerned with achieving workflow interoperability through a common unifying process model, the so-called multi-meta-model approach. The project achieved its goals in four milestones:

• Milestone M1 involved the analysis of existing state-of-the-art in workflow management software [1], process modelling approaches [2], and formal models for representing and reasoning over workflow data [3].
• Milestone M2 was concerned with the definition of a unifying process model based on the standardised process modelling language XPDL [4, 5], defined by the WfMC.
• Milestone M3 extended this process model into the process ontology (m3po) [6], specifically built to incorporate choreography modelling into workflow modelling.
• Milestone M4 focused firstly on the research and development of a Semantic Wiki for semantic process modelling [7], a suitable interface for process models since it allows ordinary users to easily edit, annotate, look-up, browse and retrieve the internal and external business processes described in the workflow ontology. Secondly, a tool was developed to automatically translate a process instance according to the XPDL schema to an ontology instance according to the m3po ontology. For the data aspect in collaborative processes, a domain ontology to formally capture the content of RosettaNet messages has been developed [8]. The ontology is a complementary to oXPDL and represents the informational aspect of the ontological framework in m3pe.

Future Research in the direction of m3pe ?

Already in parallel, a second project on the introduction of semantics to Business Process Management started as a European funded Integrated Project (IP), with the involvement of DERI and members of the m3pe team. The major objective of SUPER is similar to that of m3pe, but on a much larger scale. The objective of SUPER is to make BPM accessible at the level of semantics to business experts. The project aims at providing a semantic-based and context-aware framework, based on Semantic Web Services technology that acquires, organises, shares and uses the knowledge embedded in business processes within existing IT systems and software, and within employees' heads, in order to make companies more adaptive. More information on the project can be found at: http://www.ip-super.org/