On the automatic labeling of process models

Abstract

Process models are essential tools for managing, understanding and changing business processes. Yet, from a user perspective they can quickly become too complex to deal with. Abstraction - aggregating detailed fragments into more coarse-grained ones - has proven to be a valuable technique to simplify the view on a process model. Various techniques that automate the decision of which model fragments to aggregate have been defined and validated by recent research, but their application is hampered by the lack of abilities to generate meaningful names for such aggregated parts. In this paper, we address this problem by investigating naming strategies for individual model fragments and process models as a whole. Our contribution is an automatic naming approach that builds on the linguistic analysis of process models from industry. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.