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

3.2. SEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY AND PROCESS ONTOLOGIES 43
3.2.5 PIF (Process Interchange Format)
PIF [85] aimed to develop an interchange format to help automatically exchange process
descriptions among a wide variety of business process modeling and support systems
such as workflow software, flow charting tools, process simulation systems, and process
repositories. PIF is a formal process modeling language, whose syntax adopts that of
KIF. The main classes and their relationships are displayed in Figure 3.6. The classes
and the relationships are notated with rectangle box in the figure, and they are all the
modeling constructs of PIF.
Figure 3.6: The PIF classes and relationships [85]
There are three core classes — Activity, Actor and Resource. Other classes related
with the three classes through the relationships are attributes of them. It is obvious
that PIF supports the structural perspective by the decomposition relationship of Activity.
The operational/functional perspective can not be properly represented by lacking
input/output specifications. Relationships among the class Resource provide the
expressivity of the resources perspective. The control perspective can be represented
through the classes such as Prerequisite, Cannot-be-concurrent, Successor, Decision
and the relationships among them and Activity. Actor and their attributes can depict
the organizational perspective. No data transaction is supported by PIF.
PIF provides formally-defined declarative semantics, the expressive power to represent
knowledge required for a typical application knowledge base, and a structure that
enables semi-automatic translation into and out of typical representation languages.
PIF also adopts the frame syntax, which is an extension of the KIF syntax for representing
object-based knowledge [85]. The PIF project has been merged with the PSL
project at NIST, so that the PIF has been incorporated into the PSL Core and its
extensions.