Meta model for tracing impact of contextual information evolution in web-based workflows

Environment that shapes a business process consists of regulations, policies, guidelines, goals, etc. referred to as Contextual Information (CI) both external and internal to the organisation. In today’s global and competitive business world evolution and changes in CI, forces business processes to change. When processes are supported with web-based workflows, CI evolutions are required to be reflected in already automated systems, via process models. Due to limitations of current modelling tools, process related models fail to encapsulate CI that associates process elements to its environment. This creates inconsistencies and errors when trying to change implemented systems to reflect high-level CI changes. To address this, we propose a model, which allows tracing high-level CI changes down to the implementation level artefacts. Such a model needs to map the complex correlation between CI, all process elements (object, participants, actions and process flow rules), various web-based workflow artefacts (data, code and UIs) to a types of changes (modify, add and delete). This holistic view of the proposed model makes this research standout among other research work in process evolution area