Supporting reuse of business process models by semantic annotation

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) is a widely applied discipline in many organizations. Creating and maintaining business process models is a task that still requires much human work and is costly and cumbersome. The reuse of business process models is a solution to minimize human effort and increase quality. For reuse, appropriate process models must be discovered in a repository. Enrichment of the models with semantic annotations from domain ontologies can leverage better results for of discovering reusable process models. Although using semantically annotated business process models for the case of reuse has been mentioned and proposed in the literature, the exact requirements and implementation have yet to be analyzed in detail. This paper closes this research gap with an artifact in the form of a methodology to discover business process models. This includes a list of relevant criteria, a base ontology, possible automated annotation techniques, and a query form.