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 crit...

This special issue of Data & Knowledge Engineering contains extended versions of four papers selected from the best papers of the ‘‘International Conference on Business Process Management: On the Application of Formal Methods to Process-Aware Information Systems’’ that took place in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) in June 2003. To put the contributions to this special issue into a wider perspective...

Fortune 500 company annual reports explicitly discussed reengineering efforts that were currently under way. One analyst recently estimated the annual market for BPR services in U.S.-based companies at $1.8 billion; another predicts a growth of 20 percent each year from 1994 to 1996 (Caldwell 1994). To measure the long-term impact of this work, one must consider a multiple of this figure as the...

Business process models extracted from real event data via process mining are often visually complex and hard to interpret, cannot easily display all of the relevant process data in one view, and are of unknown quality. It is therefore difficult to present a meaningful comparison of two mined process models, for example to confirm business changes have had a significant effect. We propose a fra...

In business process design, business objective models can fulfill the role of formal requirement definitions. Matching process models against objective models would, for instance, enable sound comparison of implementation alternatives. For that purpose, objective models should be available independently of their concrete implementation in a business process. This issue is not addressed by commo...

The eCommerce system development of Intershop is based on different models on various levels of abstraction. The software engineering tool ARIS represents most of these models. In this paper we focus on the validation of the business process models on an intermediate abstraction level of the ARIS model. The business processes may be derived from process patterns and have to follow specific rule...

Cross-organizational mining is a new research field in the process mining domain, which focuses on the analysis and mining of processes in multiple organizations. Suitable access to collections of business process variants is necessary for researchers to evaluate their work in this research domain. To the best of our knowledge, no complete collection of process variants or any process variants/...

We introduce the Business Process Services Portal as an approach to make business processes more actionable and to reduce the entrance barrier for tool developers in adopting novel process-related technologies. The business process services portal makes several process-related web services available in a toolindependent manner, relying on REST technology and making use of the BPMN 2.0 standard....

Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, my husband Liwen and my son Ethan. They have always been there for me. Their endless love and support kept me going for the whole idea of " Ph. D. " v Acknowledgements

Business process modeling is the foundation of business process management (BPM). Recently, there are a large number of business process modeling approaches in BPM domain. Still, there are many differences in specific applications, due to the diversity of characteristics of the process environment and the features of business process modeling approaches. In this paper, we attempt to find the ad...