Configurable process models: A semantic validation

Abstract

Nowadays, variability management has been introduced in the field of business process modeling by means of the configurable process models solution, with a view to resolving problems of redundancy and design time errors. Nevertheless, the existing approaches of variability modeling lack of semantic representation, and consequently, present many limits regarding automation of modeling, configuring and evolving configurable processes. Recently, semantic web technologies, especially ontologies, have been proposed in order to increase the level of automation and reduce human intervention in different domains. Business process management has benefited from the emergence of these technologies and the concept of semantic business process management appeared to make the whole business process accessible to intelligent queries as for machine reasoning. Whereas most approaches focus on providing mechanisms for modeling and configuring process models, their validation was treated syntactically rather than semantically. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based approach to enhance configurable processes validation using ontologies.