Towards Petri Net WWW Community: Starting Points

This paper presents basic guidelines for building Petri net ontology, which should enable using Petri nets on the Semantic Web and help establish a true Web community of Petri net users and applications. Available Petri net model descriptions give format definitions. Their main objective is to provide the syntax for sharing Petri net models between different applications. Some of these applications are software-specific and provide either text-based format definitions (e.g., DaNAMiCS) or XML-based format definitions (e.g., Renew). Another kind of such applications proposes a universal syntax definition for model sharing, for example Abstract Petri net notation (BNF definition) and Petri Net Markup Language (XML definition). The main drawback of these solutions is their emphasis on syntax per se, ignoring the fact that syntax represents means for sharing semantics of Petri net models. Assuming that syntax is just a medium for model transportation, this paper considers the basic concepts and their relationships in existing Petri net formats. The ontology guidelines we present are based on an analysis of such formats and are represented using UML.