Towards a BPMN 2.0 Ontology

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a widely used standard for business process modelling and maintained by the Object Management Group (OMG). However, the BPMN 2.0 specification is quite comprehensive and spans more than 500 pages. The definition of an element is distributed across different sections and sometimes conflicting. In addition, the structure of the elements and their relationships are described within the metamodel, however, further syntactical rules are defined within the natural text. Therefore, this paper defines an ontology that formally represents the BPMN specification. This ontology is called the BPMN 2.0 Ontology and can be used as a knowledge base. The description of an element is combined within the corresponding class and further explanations are provided in annotations. This allows a much faster understanding of BPMN. In addition, the ontology is used as a syntax checker to validate concrete BPMN models.