Formalizing the Process of Hierarchical Workflow Abstraction Modeling

Workflow modeling is the premise of workflow management. The present paper introduces the general abstraction theory of physical world into workflow modeling to propose a novel method for hierarchical workflow abstraction modeling. Through perceiving the specific workflows running in a particular field, the workflow perceptions are obtained. A formal process is defined to learn from the acquired workflow perceptions to construct the proposed workflow ontology classes to realize modeling knowledge sharing and reuse. And, in this paper, we provide a formal definition of the workflow model and give the process to automatically create and extend it on the basis of the ontology classes and the mappings between them. Particularly, the concept of goal perception is proposed to formalize the goal-based hierarchical process of workflow abstraction modeling.