Towards a Methodology for Semantic Business Process Modeling and Configuration

This paper discusses potential benefits from adding semantics to Business Process Management from a methodological point of view, with a focus on the Modeling and Configuration phases. For this purpose, in each of these phases the established activities are examined and new activities are suggested: Firstly, we suggest combining existing control flow validation techniques with semantic process validation techniques. Second, discovery and composition techniques can be used to find implementations, e.g. services (or combinations of services), for the implementation of process activities at modeling time. The discovered implementations allow for mapping the process steps to the IT infrastructure according to several strategies during process configuration, which helps clearly separating modeling from configuration concerns. Furthermore, a new way of testing executable process models is suggested.