Conjunctive artifact-centric services

Artifact-centric services are stateful service descriptions centered around "business artifacts", which contain both a data schema holding all the data of interest for the service, and a lifecycle schema, which specifies the process that the service enacts. In this paper, the data schemas are full-fledged relational databases, and the lifecycle schemas are specified as sets of condition-action rules, where conditions are evaluated against the current snapshot of the artifact, and where actions are suitable updates to database. The main characteristic of this work is that conditions and actions are based on conjunctive queries. In particular, we exploit recent results in data exchange to specify through tuple-generating-dependencies (tgds) the effects of actions. Using such basis we develop sound and complete verification procedures, which, in spite of the fact that the number of states of an artifact-centric service can be infinite, reduce to the finite case through a suitable use of homomorphism induced by the conjunctive queries. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.