Goal Annotation of Process Models for Semantic Enrichment of Process Knowledge

A semantic annotation framework has been proposed to tackle the semantic heterogeneity problem of distributed process models in our earlier work. The goal annotation as part of the framework is further developed, in which goal ontology is annotated to process models to indicate the objectives or the capability of models. In the paper, we introduce a way to represent goal ontology, build relationships between goals and process models, and develop a goal annotation approach to process models. As an illustration, a case study is deployed with the proposed annotation approach. The results of the goal annotation enrich the semantics of process knowledge from stakeholders perspective in a cooperative goal-oriented manner. The ontology and the annotation results also facilitate the ontology-based queries for the semantic discovery and the reuse of heterogenous process models.