Automated Process Model Annotation Support: Building Blocks and Parameters

In business process modeling, semi-formal models typically rely on natural language used to express the labels of model elements. This can easily lead to ambiguities and misinterpretations. To mitigate this issue, the combination of process models with formal ontologies or predefined vocabularies has often been suggested. A cornerstone of such suggestions is to annotate elements from process models with ontologies or predefined vocabularies. Although annotation is suggested in such works, past and current approaches rarely discuss building blocks, parameters and strategies for automating the tedious and errorprone manual task. In this paper, we hence first describe the nature of the annotation task. We then identify building blocks and parameters for automated systems and describe an implementation of an annotation system we used to conduct first empirical studies on the effect of parameters. The paper at hand in sum presents design options and parameters for (semi-) automatically linking semi-formal process models with more formal knowledge representations. It hence may be a source of inspiration for further explorations and experiments on that topic. keywords: Business Process, Semantic Annotation, Automatic Matching.