Semantic Annotation for Process Models: - Department of Computer ...

5.6. SUMMARY 91
employ the annotation from the component activities to the composite activities. The
contributions of the goals annotated to the low level component activities can be passed
to or calculated for their upper level composite activities.
In goal annotation, we modify goal annotation relations through
achieves_Goal/positively_satis f ies_Goal/negatively_satis f ies_Goal in previously
defined PSAM in Chapter 4. An example of goal annotation of an activity that
achieves a hard goal is as follows:
...
5.6 Summary
As an extension of the semantic annotation framework, a goal annotation approach has
been elaborated in this chapter. The goal annotation has been designed for a goal-driven
management of heterogeneous process models on the conceptual level. Since business
process models as IS solutions were created for achieving the intentions of systems’
owners, a new problem to achieve similar intentions might reuse those solutions. Goal
annotation helps humans and machines to locate the process knowledge by specifying
the goals of process models.
The approach relies on a goal ontology, which provides common semantic representations
of goal concepts. A goal ontology reconciles intentional semantics represented
in heterogeneous models. The purpose of the goal annotation is twofold: 1) to enrich
the semantics of the objectives of processes; 2) to provide a pragmatic way to find
process knowledge based on business goals. Based on a set of goal ontology design
principles, we proposed a way to describe the semantics of goals for process model annotation
purpose. We have also discussed relations and rules between process models
and goal ontologies. The formalization of the relations can be implemented to facilitate
an automatic or semi-automatic goal annotation procedure in practice. In our
semantic annotation framework for process models, process models are first described
by PSAM (process semantic annotation model) after meta-model annotation, and then
referenced with domain ontology in model annotation. Goal annotation is therefore
employed based on the domain annotated PSAM models.