PERSPECTIVES ON SEMANTIC BUSINESS PROCESS MODELING – A GENERIC APPROACH

With the rise of SOA advance, organizations require methods and tools to analyze services regarding their fit to the needs of an institution. Research on the evaluation and selection of services has mainly adopted a non-functional perspective so far. Hence, in this paper we propose a framework for analyzing services from a business process perspective. Since we cannot automatically adjust an informal (respectively semi-formal) business process description with a formal service model, an automatic test on feasibility of the service configuration in an enterprise model is hampered. Additionally the rising number of service developers as well as the comparability requirement for models resp. model evaluation necessitates a convention-orientated constructive restriction of the degree of freedom in specific conceptual models. In this paper a generic method is represented that by adopting of Description Kits allows a restriction of freedom in modeling regarding the aspects of natural language in specific conceptual models and enables a restrictive use of existing modeling languages. As a use case the configuration of service-orientated architectures is discussed. By describing both business processes and services in such a way, we are able to formulate a mapping algorithm which allows for analyzing and evaluating the suitability of services for specific requirements