A query-driven approach for checking the semantic correctness of ontology-based process representations

Abstract

The paper presents an approach to check the semantic correctness of business process models using queries in conjunction with an ontology-based process representation. The approach is based on the formalization of the semantics of individual model elements by annotating them with concepts of a formal ontology. In order to ensure semantic correctness, constraints are formalized as queries which are executed against the ontology-based process representation. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by a user experiment. The experiment shows that searching for constraint violations using the query language produces more accurate results and is less time consuming in comparison to manual search when large models have to be checked. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.