Process role

Hello all.

I have been studying OWL-S Upper Ontology, but I have a question about
the role Process plays.

Somewhere in the technical overview, we have:
"It is important to understand that a process is not a program to be
executed. It is a specification of the ways a client may interact with
a service"

Which leads me to think that the Process is only used to describe the
interaction steps between the service provider and the requester.

On the other hand, we have (in the same document):
"The service model tells a client how to use the service, by detailing
the semantic content of requests, the conditions under which
particular outcomes will occur, and, where necessary, ***the step by
step processes leading to those outcomes***"

Which is not very clear, but gives a hint about the service internal processing.

My question is:
What is the concrete role of the Process? Can you give me an example?

To enlighten me, I would like to know if it would be possible to
express different sorting algorithms (quicksort or bubblesort) using
the Process.
If a requester knows of two services that receive a list and sort it,
knows how to interact with those services, is there any way he could
reason that a given provider uses a given algoritm, just by inspecting
the service Process?

-- 
Pedro Pais
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Received on Friday, 11 February 2005 00:21:09 UTC