Evaluating the Expressiveness of Domain Specific Modeling Languages Using the Bunge-Wand-Weber Ontology

Business Process Management is becoming an ever more important aspect for organizations alongside with Business Process Diagrams as a tool to describe business processes. So far process modeling has been mainly performed with generic process modeling languages. These approaches have however limitations when it comes to the needs of specific problem domains or automated process analysis. Semantic building block based languages (SBBL) aim to overcome those limitations by integrating domain semantics in the modeling language. However, this class of languages is only useful if they exhibit the same expressiveness as generic languages. In this paper we strive to answer this question by comparing the expressiveness of the SBBL language PICTURE with ARIS as a generic language based on the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology, showing that PICTURE has hardly construct deficits compared to ARIS while showing less construct redundancy and construct overload in its constructs.

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