Ontology-based Representation of Compliance Requirements for Service Processes

Service processes are becoming increasingly essential in modern economies as traditional, production-oriented industries decline. When comparing service processes to standard business processes, a major distinction is that the quality of their result, i.e., the service produced, cannot be measured in advance. Therefore, the compliance of the service process with quality standards plays an important role in convincing the customer that the services rendered will result in the quality specified. However, the check for compliance is still a tedious task. To address this situation, an ontology-based approach for representing service processes and checking their compliance is proposed. It is based on two ontologies: one to represent the service processes and the other to store the compliance requirements. The process representation ontology uses three so-called views to appropriately represent the service processes. The ontology for storing the compliance requirements differentiates syntactic, semantic and pragmatic requirements.