An Ontology-Enabled Approach for Modelling Business Processes

Abstract

Abstract. Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) have formal semantics and can describe any type of workflow system, behavioral and syntax wise simultaneously. They are widely studied and successfully applied in modelling of workflows and workflow systems. There is an inherent problem regarding business processes modelled with CPNs sharing and subsequently their reuse need to be considered. The Semantic Web technologies, such as ontologies, with their characteristics demonstrate that they can play an important role in this scenario. In this paper, we propose an ontological approach for representing business models in a meta-knowledge base. Firstly, the CPN ontology is defined to represent CPNs with OWL DL. Secondly, we introduce four basic types of manipulation operations on process models used to develop and modify business workflow patterns. To the best of our knowledge, representing business process definitions and business workflow patterns as knowledge based upon ontologies is a novel approach.

Ensuring the Correctness of Business Workflows at the Syntactic Level: An Ontological Approach

“…In this study, we extend our previous work [2] in designing well-formed CPNsbased business workflow templates (CBWTs) and checking their correctness. The approach is based on Knowledge Engineering, Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) and Semantic Web technologies which provide semantically rich business process definitions and automated support for CBWTs verification.…”

“…Therefore, CPNs are chosen as the workflow language in our work to transform a business process into a control flow-based business workflow template. However, it is difficult to interoperate, share and reuse business processes modelled with CPNs, i.e., business workflows, because of the lack of semantic representation of CPN components [2]. On the other hand, an ontology with its components, which provides machinereadable definitions of concepts, can represent semantically rich workflow definitions.…”

“…Once workflow definitions are stored as semantically enriched workflow templates, developers can easily build their appropriate software systems from these templates. Therefore, in this section, we shortly introduce the CPN Ontology, which is first proposed in [2] as a representation of CPNs with OWL Description Logic (OWL DL). The main purpose is to facilitate business processes modelled with CPNs to be easily shared and reused.…”

“…For example, a class Transition has two properties connectsPlace and has-GuardFunction. Consequently, the concept Transition can be glossed as "The class Transition is defined as the intersection of: (i) any class having at least one property connectsPlace whose value is equal to the class Place and; (ii) any class having one property hasGuardFunction whose value is restricted to the class GuardFunction" [2].…”

“…We have introduced the CPN ontology represented in OWL DL and axioms which are defined to support designers in verifying CPNs-based process models. It is necessary to note that, to develop or modify CBWTs (i.e., CPN models), manipulation operations [2], such as inserting new elements, deleting existing elements, etc., on business process models are required. Therefore, at design time, workflow templates stored in RDF format need to be verified before they are put into use.…”