Detecting Compliance with Business Rules in Ontology-Based Process Modeling

Extending business processes with semantic annotations has gained recent attention. This comprises relating process elements to ontology elements in order to create a shared conceptual and terminological understanding. In business process modeling, processes may have to adhere to a multitude of rules. A common way to detect compliance automatedly is studying the artifact of the process model itself. However, if an ontology exists as an additional artifact, it may prove beneficial to exploit this structure for compliance detection, as it provides a rich specification of the business process. We therefore propose an approach that models a rules-layer ontop of an ontology. Said rules-layer is implemented by a logic program and can be used to reason about the compliance of an underlying ontology. Our approach allows ad-hoc access to external ontologies, other than similar approaches that are reliant on a redundant logical representation of process model elements