Patent ID: 7617230

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for finding similarity among activities in a Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) workflow, said method comprising: inputting said BPEL workflow to a processor, said BPEL workflow comprising executable basic activities and grouping activities; automatically building a semantic action model for each of said executable basic activities and said grouping activities in said BPEL workflow using said processor, wherein said semantic action model specifies a context, associated with any of a precondition and a postcondition, for said each of said executable basic activities and said grouping activities; automatically generating an ordered list of semantic action models corresponding to said executable basic activities and said grouping activities using said processor, based on control flow ordering information inherent to semantics of said grouping activities, and preconditions and postconditions corresponding to links from a predecessor executable basic activity and a successor executable basic activity, respectively; using ordering information of each of said semantic action models, associated with a precondition or postcondition, as metadata, indicating said context for transforming a representation of said BPEL workflow by replacing sub-workflows with said semantic action models using said processor, wherein said metadata includes an equivalent causation, a same derived context, and a most constrained semantic action; and using said metadata to manage a transformed representation of said BPEL workflow and to determine a similarity between said transformed representation of said BPEL workflow and a plurality of stored workflow representations comprising semantic action models using said processor.