Semantic Lifting of Business Process Models

Mario Lezoche (1) , Antonio de Nicola (1) , Tania Di Mascio (1) , Francesco Taglino (1)

1 LEKS - Laboratory for Enterprise Knowledge and Systems

Business Process modeling is constantly acquiring attention in modern enterprises. Today, BP editor tools support modelers in building correct diagrams only from the syntactic point of view. Enriching them with ontologies may bring many advantages, that go from the possibility of applying advanced reasoning techniques, aimed at the identification of contradictions and mistakes in the model specification, to the possibility of organizing BP models repositories, with advanced search and retrieval facilities. Finally, semantic technologies can substantially help the solution of the Business/IT alignment problem. Semantic enrichment of a BP can be achieved by representing a BP, or part of it, with an ontology-oriented formalism (semantic lifting) and mapping it to a reference ontology. In this paper, we present the basic elements of a Business Process Ontology framework (OPAL+BPAL) and its concrete representation according to an OWL syntax. Finally, we show how it is possible to generate an OWL representation of a BPMN diagram.

Mots clés: business process; ontology; semantic alignment; semantic validation

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation

Mario Lezoche, Antonio de Nicola, Tania Di Mascio, Francesco Taglino. Semantic Lifting of Business Process Models. 12th Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops, Sep 2008, Munich, Germany. pp.ISBN: 978-0-7695-3720-7. ⟨hal-00656690⟩