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

Abstract
Business process models representing process knowledge about doing business are necessary
for designing Information Systems (IS) solutions in enterprises. Interoperability
of business process knowledge in legacy systems is crucial for enterprise systems interoperation
and integration due to increased enterprise cooperation and business exchange.
Many modern technologies and approaches are deployed to support business process
interoperability either at the instance level or the protocol level, such as BPML, WSDL
and SOAP. However, we argue that a holistic approach is necessary for semantic interoperability
of business process models at the conceptual level when considering the process
models as reusable process knowledge for other (new or integrated) IS solutions. This
brings requirements to manage semantic heterogeneity of process knowledge in process
models which are distributed across different enterprise systems. Semantic annotation is
an approach to achieve semantic interoperability of heterogeneous resources. However,
such an approach has usually been applied to enhance the semantics of unstructured
and structured artifacts (e.g. textual resources [72] [49], and Web services [166] [201]).
The aim of the research is to introduce an ontology-based semantic annotation approach
to enrich and reconcile semantics of process models — a kind of semi-structured
artifact, for managing process knowledge. The approach brings together techniques
in process modeling, ontology building, semantic matching, and Description Logic inference
in order to provide a comprehensive semantic annotation framework. As an
implementation of the framework, a prototype system is developed to support the
process of ontology-based semantic annotation of heterogeneous process models. The
applicational goal of our approach is to facilitate process knowledge management activities
(e.g. discovery, reuse, and integration of process knowledge/models) by enhanced
semantic interoperability.
A survey has been performed through identifying semantic heterogeneity in process
modeling and investigating semantic technology from theoretical and practical views.
Based on the results from the survey, a comprehensive semantic annotation framework
has been developed, which provides a method to manage semantic heterogeneity of
process models from the following perspectives — first, basic descriptions of process
models (profile annotation); second, process modeling languages (meta-model annotation);
third, contents of process models (model annotation) and finally intentions of
process model owners (goal annotation). Applying the semantic annotation framework,
an ontology-based annotation method has been elaborated, which results in two categories
of research activity — ontology building and semantic mapping. In ontology
building, we use Web Ontology Language (OWL), a Semantic Web technology, which
can be used to model ontologies. GPO (General Process Ontology) comprising core
concepts in most process modeling languages is proposed; domain concepts are classified
in the corresponding categories of GPO as a domain ontology; design principles
for building a goal ontology are introduced in order to serve the annotation of process
models pragmatically. In semantic mapping, a set of mapping strategies are developed
to conduct the annotation by considering the semantic relationships between model artifacts
and ontology references and as well the semantic inference mechanism supported
by OWL DL (Description Logic). The annotation method is finally formalized into a
process semantic annotation model - PSAM.