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

Chapter 1
Introduction
Business process models depict process knowledge of enterprises and they are reusable
knowledge assets in building Information System (IS) solutions for the business. When
different enterprises collaborate in business by integrating their process for a new IS
solution, there is a need for methods and technologies to manage reusable process
knowledge in the distributed process models. Semantic interoperability is an important
and difficult issue caused by the heterogeneity of various models. This thesis addresses
semantic annotation for improving semantic interoperability of heterogeneous process
models to manage process knowledge from different enterprises.
In this chapter we explain our initial interests of the topic and state the research
problem. Then we specify research questions and objectives of the work and describe
our approach under a set of research methods. Finally, we present our contributions
and outline the structure of the thesis.
1.1 Motivation
IS solutions applied in enterprises are usually expressed in certain documents addressing
different features on many levels of abstraction. For each feature and level there is a
choice of competing languages employing different system specification models (i.e.,
different modeling concepts). In addition, every IS solution is developed in its own
context, and has to satisfy the intentions of the "system’s owner". Yet, similar IS
problems may have different solutions, because the contexts differ as do the intentions
and goals of the systems’ owners.
On the other hand, different solutions for similar systems may have many similarities,
so that components of one system solution may be reused (with possible modifications)
for another system. In such a case, the reusable solutions can be considered
as knowledge addressing the problem of the system. The question is to recognize the
candidates for reuse, in spite of the different languages employed, the different contexts
and the different goals of the system owners.
As one type of IS solution models play essential roles in the modern system development
method, such as MDD (Model Driven Development) and MDA (Model Driven
Architecture) [123]. With the method of MDD, business process models representing
organizational knowledge consist of potentially reusable process model fragments for
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