An Ontology Framework for Semantic Business Process Management

A core challenge in Business Process Management is the continuous, bi-directional translation between (1) a business requirements view on the process space of an enterprise and (2) the actual process space of this enterprise, constituted by the multiplicity of IT systems, resources, and human labor. Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) [HeLD'05] is a novel approach of increasing the level of automation in the translation between these two spheres, and is currently driven by major players from the ERP, BPM, and Semantic Web Services domain, namely SAP. One core paradigm of SPBM is to represent the two spheres and their parts using ontology languages and to employ machine reasoning for the automated or semi-automated translation. In this paper, we (1) outline the representational requirements of SBPM, (2) propose a set of ontologies and formalisms, and (3) define the scope of these ontologies by giving competency questions, which is a common technique in the ontology engineering process.