An ontological approach for semantic annotation of supply chain process models

Abstract

A Supply Chain Process involves various departments and organizations. However, terminology for supply chain process models doesn't have formalized representations. Moreover, formal definitions of dynamic semantic of process models are commonly absent. Such problems discourage the integration of various process models from different partners. Thereafter, technologies of semantic annotation for business process models are developed to solve these problems. In this paper an ontological approach is proposed to annotate supply chain process models with semantic meanings. The ontology for supply chain process model, so-called scorBPMN ontology, is introduced for such semantic annotation, which specifies semantics of supply chain process models at both meta-model level and mode level. Then the similarity-based matching functionality is developed to link process model elements with concepts in the ontology. The proposed approach presents an ontological description of semantics of supply chain processes and similarity-based annotation of process models, so that various supply chain process models can be standardized and explained with unified semantic annotations, which is the basis for process integration, implementation and analysis. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.