Semantic Technology in Business Process Modeling and Analysis. Part 2: Domain Patterns and (Semantic) Process Model Elicitation

Conceptual modeling in Business Process Management (BPM) is one of the core research areas of Information Systems (IS). A variety of different strategies for modeling support and model analysis exists such as syntax-based auto-completion features, recommendation techniques, correctness and compliance checking, abstraction and matching, semantic and domain patterns, or AI-based planning approaches. These mechanisms increasingly gain attention in the BPM and conceptual modeling community. Due to the great variety of techniques and use cases of modeling support systems, research is scattered amongst different sub-communities of the large BPM and conceptual modeling communities and a common ground for discussion and research is not yet established. In order to bring together researchers working on different aspects of modeling support systems, the new working group Semantic Technologies in Business Process Management (SEMTECHBPM) has been established, which is associated with the EMISA, a sub-group of the GERMAN INFORMATICS SOCIETY (GI). The article at hand presents the second part of our overview article presenting first results of the SEMTECHBPM working group in outlining different existing research streams engaged with semantic technologies in business process modeling and analysis. Although we discussed all aspects in the working group and also invited nonmembers to contribute their knowledge prior to writing this article, we make no claim that the overview provided with this article is well-balanced or exhaustive. Rather, it should serve as a starting point to foster the collaboration between researchers engaged with semantic technologies in BPM and to promote their results. We are open to comments and welcome researchers who want to participate in the SEMTECHBPM working group. In the second part of the article, we focus on the extraction and usage of domain patterns and (semantic) process model elicitation techniques. 1 State of the Art of Semantic Technology (Part 2) 1.1 Semantic and Domain Patterns Patterns may serve as a basis for semantic modeling support and analysis. Whereas semantic patterns, for example, consist of a combination of control flow constructs to implement a specific behavior, domain patterns may specify the procedures or resources typically used in processes of a particular domain. This section provides the essential background on (business process) patterns and presents approaches that identify related patterns. Some of the approaches explicitly use semantic technologies to help identify the patterns, while others use other techniques to accomplish a semantic processing of the pattern-relevant data. In general, patterns have long proven to be effective concerning their ability to preserve existing knowledge, to abstract from concrete problems, and to foster communication between participants [?]. The use of patterns is very common in fields such as Software Engineering (patterns in this field are grounded by (software) design patterns). In the field of Business Process Management patterns constitute a rather unstructured research area due to a missing consistent definition of the term business process pattern (BPP). Due to this lack, also a systematic comparison of patterns is hampered (e.g., see the findings in [?]). A variety of patterns can be found in literature. Particularly, patterns investigating the recurring syntactic structure or behavior of process models have attracted high attention. A popular representative of this category are workflow control flow patterns [?], which describe syntactic relationships between process activities. For instance, the Parallel Split pattern describes the divergence of a branch into two or more parallel branches each of which executed concurrently (see left hand side of Figure ?? for an example ). In the following, we are particularly interested in patterns being useful for semantic technologies and patterns, which can be identified using semantic technologies. This are patterns that deal with process element labels or patterns facilitating to identify a recurring behavior of process model semantics (i.e., patterns that help to ensure compliance in busiFigure 1: Focus of Different Types of Workflow Patterns