Aligning process model terminology with hypernym relations

Abstract

Business process models are intensively used in organizations with various persons being involved in their creation. One of the challenges is the usage of a consistent terminology to label the activities of these process models. To support this task, prior research has proposed quality metrics to support the usage of consistent terms, mainly based on linguistic relations such as synonymy or homonymy. In this paper, we propose a new approach that utilizes hypernym hierarchies. We use these hierarchies to define a measure of abstractness which helps users to align the level of detail within one process model. Moreover, we define two techniques to detect specific terminology defects, namely process hierarchy defects and object hierarchy defects, and give recommendations to align them with hypernym hierarchies. We evaluate our approach on three process model collections from practice.