Semantic Business Process Analysis

Current Business Process Management technologies cover all the process life-cycle but still suffer from many limitations with respect to their complexity, maintainability and degree of automation. Recent research initiatives aim at overcoming these limitations by introducing Semantic technologies in the process life-cycle, mainly in the modeling and execution phases. But other steps of the process life-cycle can benefit from this approach too, like Business Process Analysis, that focuses on the delicate phase of studying, testing and evaluating existing and running systems and processes, with the aim of identifying the current system (process) state, as well as pointing out problems and bottlenecks, measuring key performance indicators and suggesting potential improvements. We believe that the use of Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services technologies can be of great help in improving and partially automating Business Process Analysis tasks. In this position paper, we explain how we envision the future of Semantic Business Process Analysis and we introduce the early results of our approach based on two different analysis methodologies, Reverse Business Engineering and Process Mining.