A methodology and implementing tool for semantic business process annotation

Abstract

The task of accurately model Business Process is steadily growing in complicatedness, partially due to the ever changing and dynamic contexts such processes are defined into, and the complexity of domain-specific concepts characterizing today’s global economic environment. Even though the modern IT provides several tools to help the Business Process modellers, they often do not offer sufficient support to the definition and interpretation of domain concepts or relationships, due to a general lack of precise domain knowledge and ambiguities in the terms used to define such concepts. Such semantic ambiguity negatively affects the efficiency and quality of Business Process modelling. To address these issues, an ontology based approach is proposed to mitigate semantic ambiguity, and a means to capture rich, semantic information on complex Business Processes through domain specific ontologies is presented. Also, a prototype tool which allows users to annotate existing BPMN models is described.