A Service-Oriented Architecture for Generating Sound Process Descriptions

Business process descriptions are useful documents that are becoming increasingly important for identifying and documenting business processes. They are particularly beneficial during discovery when information about the process is gathered in interviews or by observation. Such business process descriptions are written as natural language text, which makes them intrinsically ambiguous. For this reason, it is the major challenge to formulate them in a precise and correct way right from the start. Therefore, this paper presents a service oriented architecture that analyzes a process description written in natural language to generate a sound process description. Being sound means that a description is structured, unambiguous, reveals possible quality and soundness problems related to BPMN 2.0, and contains clear identifiers for all known process elements in the original text. More specifically, we develop specific analysis and transformation techniques that are integrated by our proposed architecture. For validation purposes, we have implemented a prototype of this architecture. Our evaluation demonstrates that our techniques to generate sound process descriptions cover an average of 95% of the information extracted from its original process description while maintaining quality properties. Finally, our architecture can be enhanced with additional services that contribute to the creation and management of processes descriptions in organizations.