Normative Ontologies for Data-Centric Business Process Management

This paper addresses the problem of describing and analyzing data manipulation within business process workflow specifications. We apply a model-driven approach. We begin with business requirement specifications, consisting of an ontology and an associated set of normative rules, that define the ways in which business processes can interact. We then transform this specification into a Petri Net workflow model and, separately, an Event B specification. The former models can be submitted to further behavioural analysis to ensure, for instance, satisfaction of liveness and safety properties. The latter specifications are important as we can use theorem proving techniques to check and refine data representation with respect to process evolution. An important property of the transformation is semantic equivalence between the Petri net model and Event-B model.