A Framework for the Semantic Representation of Business Processes within Business Organizational Models

The modeling of business process is a crucial task in business-based system engineering, from system analysis to simulation. In recent years, several languages to model business processes have been proposed. However, those languages usually lack full integration with other organization structural models, limiting its applicability to real systems. This paper introduces a framework that helps describe business processes and structural organization models in an integrated manner. The framework includes a conceptual model to represent, with enriched semantics, the structure and behavior of an organization, including support for BPMN-based business process models. Several research results point to ontologies as a suitable technology for semantically modeling enterprise systems, from both structural and behavioral perspectives. In this regard, the framework makes use of a set of ontologies in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) [1], which allows implicit knowledge about organizations structure and behavior to be inferred.