A new approach in the development of ontology based workflow architectures

One of the most promising tendencies in application development today is business process design based software development. Business process modelling aligns the business goals and incentives with the IT software design process. In our approach the ontology definition is a key element in turning process models into working software, providing a visual and textual representation of the processes, data, information, resources, collaborations and other measurements. We are primarily interested in the automatic generation of workflow systems based on BPM defined ontologies. In this paper the focus is given to the extension and mapping the conceptual models to ontology models by using meta-modeling approach. The model has been tested in a reference web architecture, where we have accomplished to create a general workflow management system based on generated processes. In line with the most advanced architectural principles, the proposed architecture can serve as a stand-alone workflow management system, ready to be self-deployed by organizations, or provided as cloud service instances by service providers. The key ambition in our methodology is to capitalize the synergy between the collaborative use of the modern application development paradigms and methods - like Semantic Web, Business Process Management and Model Driven Transformation.