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

Abstract

International audienceHigh quality business workflow definitions play an important role in the organization. An incorrectly defined workflow may lead to unexpected results. Therefore, each business workflow definition should be carefully analyzed before it is put into use. In this paper, we introduce an ontological approach which is suitable for ensuring the syntactic cor-rectness of business workflows. In details, we first introduce the CPN Ontology that is developed for representing CPNs with OWL DL. Then, we define axioms, which are added to the CPN Ontology to provide automated support for establishing the correctness of business workflows. Finally, by relying on the CORESE semantic engine, SPARQL queries are implemented to detect shortcomings in concrete workflows. To the best of our knowledge, this is a novel approach for representing and verifying business workflows based on ontologies

An ontological approach for organizing a knowledge base to share and reuse business workflow templates

“…Our work focuses on checking the syntactic and semantic correctness of business workflow templates at the design phase. Regarding the syntactic verification issues, we introduce twelve syntactic constraints [5]. They are categorized into two groups, including constraints related to the definition of process model and constraints related to uses of control nodes.…”

“…We get an XML file resulting in nodes that contain required information (e.g., the name) and causes shortcomings as a result of the execution of each SPARQL verification query. For more details on verifying workflow templates, we refer the readers to [4] [5].…”

“…It is important to note that the use of business workflows aims to automate and optimizes an organization's processes in an administrative context to reduce costs (e.g., human resources) and increase revenue. Up to now, there are more than a hundred business WfMSs, such as FileNet 1 , SAP 2 , JBPM 3 and Spiff Workflow 4 . Insurance, banking and health industries, for example, are domains using business workflows.…”

“…An incorrectly designed workflow may lead to failed workflow processes, execution errors or not meet the requirements of customers, etc. There is an inherent problem regarding the 1 http://www-01.ibm.com/software/ecm/filenet/ 2 http://help.sap.com/saphelp 46c/helpdata/en/c5/ e4a930453d11d189430000e829fbbd/content.htm 3 http://www.jbpm.org/ 4 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/SpiffWorkflow problem of modeling semantically rich business workflow templates 5 , workflow templates sharing and subsequently their reuse need to be considered.…”

“…Finally, we conclude the paper with an outlook on the future research in Section VII. 5 In our work, we define a definition for business workflow template: A business workflow template is a generic business workflow that can be customized according to the application. …”