Semantic Annotation of Business Process Templates

Abstract

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.

Strengthening MDE and Formal Design Models by References to Domain Ontologies. A Model Annotation Based Approach

“…This approach assumes the existence of a shared ontology and guarantees the autonomy of each source by extending the shared ontology to define its local ontology. In [23][24][25][26][27] annotations are made in an interoperable context and aim to improve the reading, common understanding and re-usability of the models and thus enabling unambiguous exchange of models. In [28], a reasoning phase is performed based on the output of the annotation phase.…”

Annotation of Engineering Models by References to Domain Ontologies

“…It shows the corresponding relations with a markup language and UML itself. [14], presented a semantic annotation method allowing the annotation of templates, process model fragments and modelling languages. General Process Ontology (GPO) is used as a reference in the ontology modelling process.…”

Semantic Process Modeling – Design and Implementation of an Ontology-based Representation of Business Processes

“…The potential of such a connection between ontologies and process models has been recognized in literature for quite a while now (Hepp et al 2005;Lin and Strasunskas 2005;Ahlemann et al 2006;Hepp and Roman 2007). Usually, the authors try to create the foundation for the automated processing of procedure models with the ontology-based attributation of process models.…”