Semantically-Aided Business Process Modeling

Enriching business process models with semantic annotations taken from an ontology has become a crucial necessity both in service provisioning, integration and composition, and in business processes management. In our work we represent semantically annotated business processes as part of an OWL knowledge base that formalises the business process structure, the business domain, and a set of criteria describing correct semantic annotations. In this paper we show how Semantic Web representation and reasoning techniques can be effectively applied to formalise, and automatically verify, sets of constraints on Business Process Diagrams that involve both knowledge about the domain and the process structure. We also present a tool for the automated transformation of an annotated Business Process Diagram into an OWL ontology. The use of the semantic web techniques and tool presented in the paper results in a novel support for the management of business processes in the phase of process modeling, whose feasibility and usefulness will be illustrated by means of a concrete example.