ARIS for Semantic Business Process Management

The application of semantic technologies promises boosting business process management, because semantic integration of business and IT is achieved. To enable the vision of semantic business process management, business experts must be able to annotate business process models semantically. In this paper we show how we extended the professional business process modelling tool ARIS to allow annotating business functions in EPC models with WSMO goals. In addition, we adapted the tool’s EPC to BPEL transformation to preserve the semantic annotations and to enable semantic web service discovery during process execution. We evaluated those extensions in an empirical case study, which was replicated 13 times by 17 participants from 8 different organisations. We received valuable feedback, which is interesting for researchers and practitioners trying to bring semantic technologies to end-users with no or limited background knowledge about semantics.