Linking Ontologies to Business Process Schemas

This report intends to lay the formal foundations of a framework for the semantic augmentation of BP schemas, in order to provide a declarative representation of workflow models, enriched with domain knowledge encoded by means of computational ontologies. The proposed framework is centered around BPAL (Business Process Abstract Language), a logic-based language for modeling and reason with both the structural specification and the dynamic behavior of a business process from a workflow perspective. BPAL relies on a formalism, logic programming, that is particularly well-suited for its use within a wider knowledge representation framework, in particular in conjunction with rule based ontology languages to capture the semantics of a business scenario. The resulting Business Process Knowledge Base provides a uniform and formal representation framework, suited for automatic reasoning and equipped with a powerful inference mechanism supported by the solutions developed in the area of Logic Programming. At the same time it has been conceived to be used in conjunction with the existing BP management tools as an „add-on‟ facility, by supporting BPMN, in particular its XPDL linear form, as a modeling notation, and OWL, for the definition of the reference ontologies.

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