A tool for the semantic annotation, validation and optimization of business process models

Abstract

The adoption of the business process model notation for the description of internal workflows and procedures by both public administrations and private organizations is steadily growing, thanks to the simplicity of the standard and its consistent expressivity. However, the lack of semantic support from BPMN can pose important limitations to its efficient use, as ambiguities in task definitions and communications can lead to misinterpretations. Furthermore, there is the need to validate the BPMNs, to check their adherence to regulations, especially in public administration, and to verify their conformance to security and privacy constraints. In this work, we present SemPrAnn, a semantic annotation tool for BPMN that, exploiting domain ontologies and logical rules, provides the possibility to unambiguously identify concepts in workflows and to run inferential engines against them to enforce the rules. The manuscript presents the methodology applied for the implementation of the tool, the tool itself with its exposed functionalities, and a case study demonstrating its current capabilities.

Semantic Web Services Ingestion in a Process Mining Framework

“…The requirement of redesigning processes or creating new ones to ensure that a public service responds to the specific needs of different citizens using a semantic approach for BPMN annotation using domain ontologies is presented. These results have been generalised in [20], which presents a semantic annotation tool for BPMN that allows to identify concepts in workflows that exploit domain ontologies and logical rules and to apply inferential engines against them to enforce these rules.…”

Optimizing Voyage Costs in Maritime Supply Chains: A Holistic Approach Towards Logistics Service Improvement and Supply Chain Finance

“…Logistics processes are typically considered in different contexts, either as internal processes within a single company or as external and cross-company processes within supply chains (Stefanou, 1999). Existing models already offer optimization approaches for both situations (e.g., Di Martino et al, 2023;Sadeghi et al, 2023). However, in the case of maritime transport, logistics processes are not fully internal due to several reasons.…”

A Review of Semantic Annotation in the Context of the Linked Open Data Cloud

“…Figure 19. MTab4D framework for tabular data annotationThe research by Di Martino et al[55] uses a technology named SemPRNN, which is a web-based tool that provides semantic annotation of business process model notation (BPMN) with OWL ontology concepts. SemPRNN uses the domain ontology to provide unambiguity to identify the concepts; this tool is used to upload the ontology, BPMN notation, and prolog to provide the annotations required for the purpose of business process models.…”