A semantic framework for compliance management in business process management

Abstract

In process-centric enterprises, business processes (BPs) are at the center of value-creating activities. Governing enterprise BPs requires the ability to control and guide BP behavior. Ensuring compliance of processes to legal regulations and strategy directives becomes a critical requirement. Implementing business process compliance makes means for modeling and enforcing compliance measures necessary. In this work, we motivate the need for automation and semantic consistency in compliance management and defend the use of policies for this purpose. We then propose a policy-based framework for business process compliance management and further detail its architecture as part of the SUPER research project on semantic business process management (SBPM). Finally, we introduce the ontology stack we propose for compliance modeling and conclude by an investigation of the main challenges ahead in order to provide an implementation of the proposed framework. This work seeks to lay down the fundaments of a comprehensive architecture for semantic compliance modeling and enforcement in the context of BPM.