Finding trading partners to establish ad-hoc business processes

Enabling technology for realizing ad-hoc business processes currently is becoming more and more popular, like for example web services. Ad-hoc business processes are semantically characterized by a description of the exchanged messages and by the potential message sequences. These semantic meta-data are required to enable efficient and precise searching and finding of potential trading partners. Based on the experience of current web technology, manual maintenance of meta-data is neglected by most editors, therefore the meta-data must be generated automatically. Within this paper, we propose a method to derive a specification of potential message sequences based on a private workflow model. Further, we describe an algorithm for matchmaking of message sequence specifications as part of a search engine for ad-hoc business processes.