Patterns for Semantic Business Process Modeling
- Business Process Management has been one of the main topics in commercial information technology for many years and is becoming even more important now. The graphical modeling of business processes and their processing into software products requires so much human labor, that the production cycles can not comply with the fast changing demands of today's global markets. To improve the degree of automatic processing in Business Process Management, techniques from the Semantic Web like ontologies and reasoners have been transfered to the business process world. A new research area - Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) - with semantically enriched business process models as one of its main elements has been established. Because Semantic Business Process Management is such a new research area, there are plenty of different ideas on how semantic technologies could improve Business Process Management. But they all have in common, that semantically enriched business process models areBusiness Process Management has been one of the main topics in commercial information technology for many years and is becoming even more important now. The graphical modeling of business processes and their processing into software products requires so much human labor, that the production cycles can not comply with the fast changing demands of today's global markets. To improve the degree of automatic processing in Business Process Management, techniques from the Semantic Web like ontologies and reasoners have been transfered to the business process world. A new research area - Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) - with semantically enriched business process models as one of its main elements has been established. Because Semantic Business Process Management is such a new research area, there are plenty of different ideas on how semantic technologies could improve Business Process Management. But they all have in common, that semantically enriched business process models are the key to all the future benefits. Nonetheless there is no common understanding on what additional information a business process model has to hold for all the different SBPM applications. After an introduction to important concepts and technologies, this report provides patterns for Semantic Business Process Modeling. Based on the different SBPM applications, the new requirements for process models are determined and lead to a final pattern set, that describes what additional semantically enhanced information is necessary. Suggestions for the implementation of the patterns in modeling notations are included, too. Additionally, two actual modeling notations, the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and AgilPro are reviewed for their compliance with the patterns for Semantic Business Process Modeling.…
