State-Based Event Modeling

The lack of formal semantics of traditional approaches to business process modeling negatively affects the integration and sharing of models. The approaches that provide a semantics often do not discuss the ontological foundation of the assumed primitives hindering the intelligibility of the models. We propose an ontological founded modeling framework in which synchronic properties and relations among objects are reified into states. States represent the basic blocks on which events are built according to unity criteria. We discuss how our framework accommodates different philosophical standpoints on events and we illustrate how it can be used to ground event calculus, CLIMB, PSL, and BPMN.