Process models represent valuable resources for integration and alignment of business processes. Nowadays, due to networked business and tighter integration along a value chain, the number of enterprises that need to orchestrate their workflows is increasing. These circumstances urge companies to improve management of process models and templates. Machine-readable and interoperable semantics of the process templates facilitate retrieval and reuse. However, the heterogeneity of both model representations and modeling languages makes it difficult to retrieve, comprehend, compare, and reuse the templates. Therefore, in this chapter we elaborate on the semantic annotation of process model templates consisting of three basic parts: meta-model, domain, and goal annotations. For this purpose, we use ontologies representing generic constructs of process models, concepts from a business domain, and business goals. We illustrate application of the approach in OWL and provide a case study with exemplary semantic queries.
Effective discovery and sharing of process models within and/or across enterprises are important in process model management. A semantic annotation approach has been applied for specifying process semantic heterogeneity in the semantic process model discovery in our previous work. In this paper, the approach is further developed into a complete and systematic semantic annotation framework. Four perspectives are tackled in our framework: basic description of process models (profile annotation), process modeling languages (meta-model annotation), process models (model annotation) and the purpose of the process models (goal annotation). Ontologies, including modeling ontology, domain specific ontology and goal ontology, are used for annotation of process models to achieve semantic interoperability. A set of mapping strategies are defined to guide users to annotate process models.
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