A business process meta-model: construction from the literature and ontological clarifications

Abstract

While modern definitions of business processes exist and are shared in the business process management (BPM) community, a commonly agreed meta-model is still missing. Nonetheless, several different business process metamodels have been proposed and discussed in the literature, which look at business process models from different perspectives, focusing on different aspects and often using different labels for denoting the same element or element relation. In this paper, we extend and consolidate an effort of building a business process meta-model starting from elements and relations discovered inspecting relevant literature through a systematic literature review. The obtained literature-based business process meta-model, which is on purpose built to disclose critical issues, is then inspected, compared to a previous, more restricted, version, and discussed. The analysis confirms a lack of attention to some crucial business process elements, as well as the presence of some unclear relations and subsumption cycles. Moreover it brings about new issues and inconsistencies in the meta-models proposed in literature, which we address - at least in part - using an ontological analysis.