Ontology-based translation of business process models

Semantic Business Process Management is a recent and promising research area devoted to extending the results from Semantic Web Services - 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. One important task for Semantic Business Process Management is 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 Business Process Management is hence to relate business-oriented and IT/service-oriented views of processes ontologically. Previous work has shown how an ontology language rich enough to encode rules can provide a relationship between an abstract ontology for business processes and a low-level ontological representation of process behaviour providing behavioural semantics for these business processes. In this paper we show how business-oriented and execution-oriented ontological representations of business processes can similarly be related