Semantic Business Process Management

Semantic Business Process Management (Semantic BPM) is a recent and promising research area devoted to extending the results from Semantic Web Services (SWS) - i.e., the application of ontology-based modelling and reasoning to Web Services - to Business Process Management, which is these days often realised using Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). Semantic BPM, from one point of view, concerns the addition of corresponding semantic annotations to the business-oriented view on processes. Since, however, the Semantic Web approach, realised using ontologies, is not simply to represent conceptualisations (in the style of a data model) but to embody relationships and inferences over such conceptualisations, an equally important task to realise Semantic BPM is hence to relate business-oriented and IT/service-oriented views of processes ontologically.

The SUPER project has proposed an ontology stack for Semantic BPM, two ontologies from which correspond to these viewpoints. Firstly, the Business Process Modelling Ontology (BPMO) attempts to model a business analyst’s view on a business process in its organizational context and business domain. Secondly Semantic BPEL is an ontology-based view on a SWS-based extension to BPEL, the industry’s de facto standard for representing service-oriented executable business processes. Two corresponding deliverables in the CMS working group will continue the work on these ontologies to standardization, and consider their inter-relationship with each other and other relevant CMS work.

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