Organization Structure Description for the Needs of Semantic Business Process Management

Various attempts have been undertaken to further automate the BPM lifecycle. One of the recent initiatives in this area is the Semantic Business Process Management approach as pursued within the SUPER project. It aims at bridging the gap between business and IT worlds by increasing the degree of automation within the BPM lifecycle using Semantic Web and Semantic Web services technologies. In order to fulfil the SBPM vision, enterprises as well as their environment need to be properly described. The main contribution of this paper is a set of ontologies for describing organizational structures and examples showing how they may be combined with further organizational information, e.g., business functions and business roles, to support the automatic analysis of business processes.