Semantically Enabled Business Process Discovery

Resumo

Business process descriptions are usually stored in internal enterprise repositories. In order to be able to reuse Business Processes (a.k.a. BPs), BP designers require some tools to help them to discover processes (or fragments of processes) in the repository based on these descriptions. In most cases discovery is a difficult task (the diversity of modeling languages, the process descriptions are very close to the IT level being far from the business level, there is a lack of automatic tools, etc.). In this paper we investigate the use of semantics to alleviate the above mentioned problems providing with a method for the discovery of BPs. We have developed an RDF vocabulary to annotate and store BPs. First we use the vocabulary to annotate functional and non functional properties of basic activities of XML-based BP descriptions. Then we build an RDF knowledge base following the developed RDF vocabulary by extracting, in an automatic way, these properties and the structural properties from the BP description. In addition, functional and non functional properties of structured activities are automatically computed and added to the RDF knowledge base. Then the RDF knowledge base can be queried with SPARQL to achieve BPs discovery. In addition, we present an implementation prototype. © 2010 ACM.