Spotting terminology deficiencies in process model repositories

Abstract

Thinking in business processes and using process models for their documentation has become common practice in companies. In many cases this documentation encompasses more than thousands of models. One of the key challenges is achieving consistency of the process model terminology. Especially, the usage of synonym and homonym words is one of the most severe problems for terminological consistency. Therefore, this paper presents an automatic approach to identify synonym and homonym words in model repositories. We challenged the approach against three model collection from practice that are assumed to have different levels of terminological consistency. The evaluation shows that the approach is capable to fulfill these goals and to identify meaningful synonym and homonym candidates for follow-up resolution. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.