Preserving consistency in domain-specific business processes through semantic representation of artefacts

Abstract

Large organizations today face a growing challenge of managing heterogeneous process collections containing business processes. Explicit semantics inherent to domain-specific models can help alleviate some of the management challenges. Starting with concept definitions, designers can create domain specific processes and eventually generate industry-standard BPMN for use in BPMS solutions. However, any of these artefacts (concepts, domain processes and BPMN) can be modified by various stakeholders and changes done by one person may influence models used by others. There is therefore a need for tool support to aid in keeping track of changes done and their impacts on different stakeholders. In this paper we present an approach towards providing such support based on a semantic layer that records the provenance of the information and accordingly propagates impacts of changes to related resources, and illustrate the applicability of the approach via an illustrative example.