Semantic Business Process Modeling

Web services and BPM have become a combination research aiming at enterprize computing providing a more intelligent and interactive services as processaware systems. In particular, with the emergence of BPEL4WS as a de-facto industrial standard for process grounding technology, Web services become the building blocks for the final process execution. However, really combining those two topics is still very hard as different perspectives (business and technical). With the development of semantics, especially semantic Web services, researchers propose SBPM to bridge the gap between business and technical levels. To achieve this, we need a comprehensive process modeling approach. Traditional process modeling has a long research history. From industrial perspective, the focuses of process modeling are pervasively on providing graphic-based modeling tools (Workflow or BPM suites) with various process notations, such as UML, BPMN and EPCs. Besides graphical modeling, language-based process description is another main emphasis, such as BPML, BPEL, XPDL etc. From academic perspective, there are also many formal concurrency theories supporting process automation and validation, such as Petri Net, Abstract State Machine, Process Algebra like Pi-Calculus, and some logic based AI models like Temporal Logic and Transaction Logic. However, neither industrial tools nor theoretical methods can completely support smooth combination between Web service and BPM. Therefore, the main motivation of this PhD research is to provide a semantic modeling framework for business processes, named Business Process Management Ontology (BPMO), which acts as the cornerstone of SBPM and the key transition role between business level and technical level. Problem Statement Based on the vision of SBPM and the fundamental cornerstone about semantic process modeling, we provide following key issues as the problem statement ought to be involved and given appropriate solutions in this PhD research: (1)Process Modeling Requirements Modeling requirements (or called process description requirements) is the basis for the whole BPMO proposal, which needs to be determined first. Basically, we should answer ”what kind of concepts are involved?” and ”what is the crucial functional requirements and nun-functional requirements need to be described for business processes?”. (2)Process Modeling Architecture (Elements and Language) Based on the previous determined requirements, we need a fully-fledged modeling architecture with comprehensive elements to cover all the requirements. A certain descrip-