Semantic Lifting of Business Process Models

Business Process (BP) modeling is constantly acquiring attention in modern enterprises. Today, BP editor tools support modelers in building correct diagrams only from the syntactic point of view. Enriching them with ontologies can bring many advantages as the possibility of applying advanced reasoning techniques, aimed at the identification of contradictions and mistakes in the model specification, and the possibility of organizing BP models repositories, with advanced search and retrieval facilities. Furthermore, semantic technologies can substantially support business/IT alignment. Semantic enrichment of BPs can be achieved by representing a BP, or part of it, with an ontology-oriented formalism (semantic lifting) and mapping it to a reference ontology. In this paper, we present the basic elements of a business process ontology framework (OPAL+BPAL) and its concrete representation according to OWL syntax. Finally, we show how it is possible to generate an OWL representation of a BPMN diagram.