An Ontological Approach to Business Process Modeling

Business people use informal methods to represent business processes (BP), having the main objective to support an enterprise organization. On the other hand, application software is increasingly based on Service Oriented Architectures, where the application logic is represented by executable BP (e.g., by using BPEL.) Despite both are aiming at BP modelling, the methods used by business people and IT specialists are quite different. The former use informal, descriptive methods, with an intuitive semantics difficult to be translated to the formal representation needed in the IT world. This paper presents the main lines of an ontological framework for the representation of BP semantics: BPAL (Business Process Abstract Language.) It is primarily conceived to provide a formal semantics to BPMN, an informal BP modelling method that is emerging in the business world. The modelling categories of BPAL are based on well accepted business notions, such as activity, decision, role. We believe that it may be useful beyond BPMN, in more general business contexts. BPAL is an abstract language (no drawing symbols are provided) having a procedural semantics (allowing a translation to an executable form, BPEL), and a declarative semantics, to be processed by an inference engine.