Collaborative Business Processes (cBPs) form the backbone of enterprise integration. With the growing reliance on the web as a medium of business collaboration, there is an increasing need to quickly and dynamically form cBPs. However, current Business-to-Business (B2B) information systems are still static in nature, and are unable to dynamically form cBPs based on high-level Business Goals (BGs)and their underlying criteria (e.g., item cost, product name, order quantity, etc). This paper introduces the Business-OWL (BOWL), an ontology rooted in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and modeled as a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) for the dynamic formation of business processes. An ontologized extension and augmentation of traditional HTN, BOWL describes business processes as a hierarchical ontology of decomposable business tasks encompassing all possible decomposition permutations. Through BOWL, high-level business goals (e.g., "Buy”) can be easily decomposed right down to the lowest level tasks (e.g., "Send Purchase Order”), effectively bridging the gap between high-level business goals with operational level tasks and complementing currently static business process modeling languages. The design of BOWL and a case study demonstrating its implementation are also discussed.

Increased trade and globalization has created an increasing need for the dynamic formulation and integration of cross-enterprise collaborative business processes (cBP’s). However, current systems and methodologies, being static in nature, are unable to dynamically formulate cBP’s based on business goals and selection criteria. Much of this stems from the current inability to bridge high level strategic business goals to low-level operational tasks, and the inability to dynamically decompose compound business process tasks into primitive operational tasks for direct Web service execution.In this paper, we demonstrate how the concepts from hierarchical task network (HTN) planning are feasible for dynamically creating cBP task sequences ideal for direct Web service execution. We also establish the rationale behind modeling business-to-business (B2B) collaboration tasks as hierarchical Web ontologies. To demonstrate the achievability of dynamic cBP formulation, we developed the Genesis methodology, which consists of (1) Business-OWL (BOWL) - a B2B hierarchical task Web ontology, and (2) the Genesis algorithm – an extension of the hierarchical task network (HTN) planning algorithm to handle business criteria and control flows commonly found in business processes.

B2B collaborations today are typically short-term and dynamic, so it is imperative that business processes be quickly and accurately forged. This paper details research that combines both the context-aware (CA) approach and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) technique to select and rank potential partners in context-enabled B2B collaborations. The approach was validated by a case study. A review of context-aware applications and the criteria for the selection of potential partners are also presented.