A lightweight RDF data model for business process analysis

Abstract

This article presents a lightweight data representation model designed to support real time monitoring of business processes. The model is based on a shared vocabulary defined using open standard representations (RDF) allowing independence and extremely flexible interoperability between applications. The main benefit of this representation is that it is transparent to the data creation and analysis processes; furthermore it can be extended progressively when new information is available. Business Process data represented with this data model can be easily published on-line and shared between applications. After the definition of the data model, in this article, we demonstrate that with the use of this representation it is possible to retrieve and make use of domain specific information without any previous knowledge of the process. This model is a novel approach to real-time process data representation and paves the road to a complete new breed of applications for business process analysis.