Analysis and mining of ontological process model instances

The application of ontologies to Business Process Management has been introduced to improve the level of automation in the execution of processes. Ontologies aid in the description of the process model as well as in their exchanged data. This paper presents an ontological model for workflow logs, namely oXPDL+. The model builds upon a process interchange ontology based on the standardised XML Process Definition Language (XPDL). oXPDL+ can be used to not only exchange process models, but also workflow logs representing instances of such process models. We present a mapping architecture and implementation to populate a knowledge base with ontologically described process models and workflow logs. By defining a set of ordering relations in the ontological model, it is possible to analyse the model based on a combination of its static and behavioural properties. The use of semantics to model processes allows to interlink local information with knowledge defined in background ontologies, leading to significant enhancements in analysis and mining techniques. Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland. E-mail: {firstname.lastname}@deri.org. Acknowledgements: This material is based upon works supported by the Science Foundation Ireland under Grant No. SFI/02/CE1/I131 and No. SFI/04/BR/CS0694. Copyright c © 2008 by the authors DERI TR 2008-03-28 I