Assessing Semantic Consistency of Business Process Models
Business process modeling has become an accepted
means for designing and describing business operations. Thereby,
consistency of business process models, i.e., the absence of modeling
faults, is of upmost importance to organizations. This paper presents
a concept and subsequent implementation for detecting faults in
business process models and for computing a measure of their
consistency. It incorporates not only syntactic consistency but also
semantic consistency, i.e., consistency regarding the meaning of
model elements from a business perspective.
[1] Frank, U.: Informationstechnologie und Organisation. In: Schreyögg, G., Werder, A.v. (eds.) Handwörterbuch Unternehmensf├╝hrung und
Organisation (HWO), pp. 472-480. Schäffer-Poeschel, S.l. (2004)
[2] Scheer, A.W., N├╝ttgens, M.: ARIS Architecture and Reference Models
for Business Process Management. In: van Aalst, W.d. (ed.) Business
process management. Models, techniques, and empirical studies, pp.
376-389. Springer, Berlin (2000)
[3] Weske, M.: Business Process Management. Concepts, Languages,
Architectures Springer Berlin Heidelberg (2007)
[4] Scheer, A.-W.: ARIS - business process modeling Springer, Berlin
(2000)
[5] Aagesen, G., Krogstie, J.: Analysis and Design of Business Processes
Using BPMN. In: Vom Brocke, J., Rosemann, M. (eds.) Handbook on
Business Process Management 1, pp. 213-235. Springer, Berlin
Heidelberg (2010)
[6] Simon, C., Mendling, J.: Integration of Conceptual Process Models by
the Example of Event-driven Process Chains. In: Oberweis, A.,
Weinhardt, C., Gimpel, H. (eds.) eOrganisation. Service-, Prozess-,
Market-Engineering. Bd. 1. 8. Internationale Tagung
Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI 2007), pp. 677-694. Univ.-Verl. Karlsruhe,
Karlsruhe (2007)
[7] Gottschalk, F., van der Aalst, W.: Merging Event-Driven Process
Chains. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds.) On the move to meaningful
internet systems: OTM 2008. OTM 2008 confederated international
conferences, CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE 2008, Monterrey,
Mexico, November 2008 ; proceedings, part I, pp. 418-426. Springer,
Berlin (2008)
[8] Schmelzer, H.J., Sesselmann, W.: Geschäftsprozessmanagement in der
Praxis. Hanser, M├╝nchen (2008)
[9]. Mendling, J.: Metrics for Process Models. Empirical Foundations of
Verification, Error Prediction, and Guidelines for Correctness Springer
Berlin Heidelberg (2009)
[10] Harmon, P.: Business process change. A guide for business managers
and BPM and six sigma professionals, Elsevier, Amsterdam (2007)
[11] Esswein, W., Gehlert, A., Seiffert, G.: Towards a Framework for Model
Migration. In: Persson, A., Stirna, J. (eds.) Advanced information
systems engineering. Proceedings of the 16th international conference
(CAiSE 2004), pp. 463-476. Springer, Berlin (2004)
[12] Keller, G., N├╝ttgens, M., Scheer, A.W.: Semantische
Prozeßmodellierung auf der Grundlage ÔÇ×Ereignisgesteuerter
Prozeßketten (EPK). Technical Report: Veröffentlichungen des Instituts
für Wirtschaftsinformatik (IWi), Universität des Saarlandes, Heft 89.
Saarbr├╝cken (1992)
[13] Aris Community: Event-driven process chain (EPC),
http://www.ariscommunity.com/event-driven-process-chain, last
accessed 30.01.12
[14] Ambler, S.W.: The elements of UML 2.0 style. Cambridge Univ. Press,
Cambridge (2005)
[15] Allweyer, T.: BPMN 2.0. Introduction to the standard for business
process modeling. Books on Demand, Norderstedt (2010)
[16] StarUML - The Open Source UML/MDA Platform,
http://staruml.sourceforge.net/en/, last accessed 30.01.12
[17] bflow* Toolbox, http://sourceforge.net/projects/bflowtoolbox/, last
accessed 30.01.12
[18] Humm, B., Korobov, A.: Introducing Layers of Abstraction to Semantic
Web Programming. In: Robert Meersman, Tharam S. Dillon, Pilar
Herrero (eds.) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2011
Workshops - Confederated International Workshops and Posters:
EI2N+NSF ICE, ICSP+INBAST, ISDE, ORM, OTMA,
SWWS+MONET+SeDeS, and VADER 2011, Hersonissos, Crete,
Greece, October , 2011. Proceedings, pp. 412-423. Springer (2011)
[19] The University of Sheffield: GATE general architecture of text
engineering, http://gate.ac.uk/, last accessed 30.01.12
[20] Princeton University: WordNet - About WordNet,
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/, last accessed 30.01.12
[21] Havey, M.: Essential business process modeling. O'Reilly, Beijing
(2005)
[22] Becker, J., Rosemann, M., Uthmann, C.: Guidelines of Business Process
Modeling. In: van Aalst, W.d. (ed.) Business process management.
Models, techniques, and empirical studies, pp. 30-49. Springer, Berlin
(2000)
[23] Sch├╝tte, R.: Grunds├ñtze ordnungsm├ñßiger Referenzmodellierung.
Gabler, Wiesbaden (2001)
[24] Hadar, I., Soffer, P.: Variations in Conceptual Modeling: Classification
and Ontological Analysis. Journal of the AIS 7, 568-592 (2006)
[25] Becker, J., Delfmann, P., Herwig, S., Lis, L., Malsbender, A., Stein, A.:
Ein automatisiertes Verfahren zur Sicherstellung der
konventionsgerechten Bezeichnung von Modellelementen im Rahmen
der konzeptionellen Modellierung. In: Engels, G., Karagiannis, D.,
Mayr, H.C. (eds.) Modellierung 2010, pp. 49-65 (2010)
[26] Pablo A. Straub, Carlos Hurtado L: Behavioral Consistency in Business
Process Models. Technical Report RT-PUC-DCC-95-4,Catholic
University of Chile, Computer Science Department (1995)
[27] van Dongen, B.F., Mendling, J.: Structural Patterns for Soundness of
Business Process Models. In: In EDOC -06: Proceedings of the 10th
IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference
(EDOC-06), pp. 116ÔÇÉ128. IEEE Computer Society (2006)
[28] Yu, E.S., Mylopoulos, J.: Using Goals, Rules and Methods to Support
Reasoning in Business Process Reengineering. Intelligent Systems in
Accounting, Finance & Management 5 (1996)
[29] Ehrig, M., Koschmider, A., Oberweis, A.: Measuring Similarity between
Semantic Business Process Models. In: Roddick, John F., Hinze, A.
(eds.) Proceedings of the Fourth Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual
Modelling (APCCM 2007), pp. 71-80. Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
(2007)
[30] Di Francescomarino, C., Ghidini, C., Rospocher, M., Serafini, L.,
Tonella, P.: Reasoning on Semantically Annotated Processes. In:
Bouguettaya, A., Krueger, I., Margaria, T. (eds.) Service-Oriented
Computing - ICSOC 2008, 5364, pp. 132-146. Springer Berlin
Heidelberg (2008)
[31] Markovic, I.: Semantic business process modeling. Dissertation, KIT
Scientific Publ, Karlsruhe, Karlsruher Inst. f├╝r Technologie (2009)
[32] Dijkman, R., van Dongen, B., Dumas, M., Käärik, R., Mendling, J.:
Similarity of Business Process Models: Metrics and Evaluation. Journal
of Information Systems 36(2): 498-516 (2011)
[33] Khlif, W., Makni, L., Zaaboub, N., Ben-Abdallah, H.: Quality metrics
for business process modeling. In: Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS
international conference on Applied computer science, pp. 195ÔÇÉ200.
World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society (WSEAS),
Stevens Point, Wisconsin, USA (2009)
[34] Vanderfeesten, I., Cardoso, J., Mending, J., Reijers, H.A., van der Aals,
W.: Quality Metrics for Business Process Models. In: Fischer, L. (ed.)
BPM & Workflow Handbook. Methods, concepts, case studies and
standards in business process management and workflow. Future
Strategies, Lighthouse Point, Fla (2007)
[35] Yan, Z., Dijkman, R., Grefen, P.: Fast Business Process Similarity
Search with Feature-Based Similarity Estimation. In: Dillon, T., Herrero,
P. (eds.) On the move to meaningful internet systems: OTM 2010.
Confederated international conferences: CoopIS, IS, DOA and
ODBASE, Hersonissos, Crete, Greece, October 2010 ; proceedings, part
I, pp. 60-77. Springer, Berlin (2010)
[36] Kunze, M., Weske, M.: Metric Trees for Efficient Similarity Search in
Large Process Model Repositories. In: Zur M├╝hlen, M., Su, J. (eds.)
Business Process Management Workshops. International Workshops and
Education Track. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2011)
[37] La Rosa, M., Dumas, M., Käärik, R. and Dijkman, R.: Merging Business
Process Models. Extended Version, BPM Center Report BPM-09-22,
BPMcenter.org, bpmcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/reports/2009/BPM-
09-22.pdf, last accessed 30.01.2012
[38] Marwane El Kharbili, Sebastian Stein, Ivan Markovic, Elke
Pulverm├╝ller: Towards a Framework for Semantic Business Process
Compliance Management. In: Proceedings of the 1st International
Workshop on Governance, Risk and Compliance - Applications in
Information Systems (GRCIS'08) held in conjunction with the CAiSE'08
Conference, pp. 1-15. Vol-339. CEUR Workshop Proceedings (2008)
[1] Frank, U.: Informationstechnologie und Organisation. In: Schreyögg, G., Werder, A.v. (eds.) Handwörterbuch Unternehmensf├╝hrung und
Organisation (HWO), pp. 472-480. Schäffer-Poeschel, S.l. (2004)
[2] Scheer, A.W., N├╝ttgens, M.: ARIS Architecture and Reference Models
for Business Process Management. In: van Aalst, W.d. (ed.) Business
process management. Models, techniques, and empirical studies, pp.
376-389. Springer, Berlin (2000)
[3] Weske, M.: Business Process Management. Concepts, Languages,
Architectures Springer Berlin Heidelberg (2007)
[4] Scheer, A.-W.: ARIS - business process modeling Springer, Berlin
(2000)
[5] Aagesen, G., Krogstie, J.: Analysis and Design of Business Processes
Using BPMN. In: Vom Brocke, J., Rosemann, M. (eds.) Handbook on
Business Process Management 1, pp. 213-235. Springer, Berlin
Heidelberg (2010)
[6] Simon, C., Mendling, J.: Integration of Conceptual Process Models by
the Example of Event-driven Process Chains. In: Oberweis, A.,
Weinhardt, C., Gimpel, H. (eds.) eOrganisation. Service-, Prozess-,
Market-Engineering. Bd. 1. 8. Internationale Tagung
Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI 2007), pp. 677-694. Univ.-Verl. Karlsruhe,
Karlsruhe (2007)
[7] Gottschalk, F., van der Aalst, W.: Merging Event-Driven Process
Chains. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds.) On the move to meaningful
internet systems: OTM 2008. OTM 2008 confederated international
conferences, CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE 2008, Monterrey,
Mexico, November 2008 ; proceedings, part I, pp. 418-426. Springer,
Berlin (2008)
[8] Schmelzer, H.J., Sesselmann, W.: Geschäftsprozessmanagement in der
Praxis. Hanser, M├╝nchen (2008)
[9]. Mendling, J.: Metrics for Process Models. Empirical Foundations of
Verification, Error Prediction, and Guidelines for Correctness Springer
Berlin Heidelberg (2009)
[10] Harmon, P.: Business process change. A guide for business managers
and BPM and six sigma professionals, Elsevier, Amsterdam (2007)
[11] Esswein, W., Gehlert, A., Seiffert, G.: Towards a Framework for Model
Migration. In: Persson, A., Stirna, J. (eds.) Advanced information
systems engineering. Proceedings of the 16th international conference
(CAiSE 2004), pp. 463-476. Springer, Berlin (2004)
[12] Keller, G., N├╝ttgens, M., Scheer, A.W.: Semantische
Prozeßmodellierung auf der Grundlage ÔÇ×Ereignisgesteuerter
Prozeßketten (EPK). Technical Report: Veröffentlichungen des Instituts
für Wirtschaftsinformatik (IWi), Universität des Saarlandes, Heft 89.
Saarbr├╝cken (1992)
[13] Aris Community: Event-driven process chain (EPC),
http://www.ariscommunity.com/event-driven-process-chain, last
accessed 30.01.12
[14] Ambler, S.W.: The elements of UML 2.0 style. Cambridge Univ. Press,
Cambridge (2005)
[15] Allweyer, T.: BPMN 2.0. Introduction to the standard for business
process modeling. Books on Demand, Norderstedt (2010)
[16] StarUML - The Open Source UML/MDA Platform,
http://staruml.sourceforge.net/en/, last accessed 30.01.12
[17] bflow* Toolbox, http://sourceforge.net/projects/bflowtoolbox/, last
accessed 30.01.12
[18] Humm, B., Korobov, A.: Introducing Layers of Abstraction to Semantic
Web Programming. In: Robert Meersman, Tharam S. Dillon, Pilar
Herrero (eds.) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2011
Workshops - Confederated International Workshops and Posters:
EI2N+NSF ICE, ICSP+INBAST, ISDE, ORM, OTMA,
SWWS+MONET+SeDeS, and VADER 2011, Hersonissos, Crete,
Greece, October , 2011. Proceedings, pp. 412-423. Springer (2011)
[19] The University of Sheffield: GATE general architecture of text
engineering, http://gate.ac.uk/, last accessed 30.01.12
[20] Princeton University: WordNet - About WordNet,
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/, last accessed 30.01.12
[21] Havey, M.: Essential business process modeling. O'Reilly, Beijing
(2005)
[22] Becker, J., Rosemann, M., Uthmann, C.: Guidelines of Business Process
Modeling. In: van Aalst, W.d. (ed.) Business process management.
Models, techniques, and empirical studies, pp. 30-49. Springer, Berlin
(2000)
[23] Sch├╝tte, R.: Grunds├ñtze ordnungsm├ñßiger Referenzmodellierung.
Gabler, Wiesbaden (2001)
[24] Hadar, I., Soffer, P.: Variations in Conceptual Modeling: Classification
and Ontological Analysis. Journal of the AIS 7, 568-592 (2006)
[25] Becker, J., Delfmann, P., Herwig, S., Lis, L., Malsbender, A., Stein, A.:
Ein automatisiertes Verfahren zur Sicherstellung der
konventionsgerechten Bezeichnung von Modellelementen im Rahmen
der konzeptionellen Modellierung. In: Engels, G., Karagiannis, D.,
Mayr, H.C. (eds.) Modellierung 2010, pp. 49-65 (2010)
[26] Pablo A. Straub, Carlos Hurtado L: Behavioral Consistency in Business
Process Models. Technical Report RT-PUC-DCC-95-4,Catholic
University of Chile, Computer Science Department (1995)
[27] van Dongen, B.F., Mendling, J.: Structural Patterns for Soundness of
Business Process Models. In: In EDOC -06: Proceedings of the 10th
IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference
(EDOC-06), pp. 116ÔÇÉ128. IEEE Computer Society (2006)
[28] Yu, E.S., Mylopoulos, J.: Using Goals, Rules and Methods to Support
Reasoning in Business Process Reengineering. Intelligent Systems in
Accounting, Finance & Management 5 (1996)
[29] Ehrig, M., Koschmider, A., Oberweis, A.: Measuring Similarity between
Semantic Business Process Models. In: Roddick, John F., Hinze, A.
(eds.) Proceedings of the Fourth Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual
Modelling (APCCM 2007), pp. 71-80. Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
(2007)
[30] Di Francescomarino, C., Ghidini, C., Rospocher, M., Serafini, L.,
Tonella, P.: Reasoning on Semantically Annotated Processes. In:
Bouguettaya, A., Krueger, I., Margaria, T. (eds.) Service-Oriented
Computing - ICSOC 2008, 5364, pp. 132-146. Springer Berlin
Heidelberg (2008)
[31] Markovic, I.: Semantic business process modeling. Dissertation, KIT
Scientific Publ, Karlsruhe, Karlsruher Inst. f├╝r Technologie (2009)
[32] Dijkman, R., van Dongen, B., Dumas, M., Käärik, R., Mendling, J.:
Similarity of Business Process Models: Metrics and Evaluation. Journal
of Information Systems 36(2): 498-516 (2011)
[33] Khlif, W., Makni, L., Zaaboub, N., Ben-Abdallah, H.: Quality metrics
for business process modeling. In: Proceedings of the 9th WSEAS
international conference on Applied computer science, pp. 195ÔÇÉ200.
World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society (WSEAS),
Stevens Point, Wisconsin, USA (2009)
[34] Vanderfeesten, I., Cardoso, J., Mending, J., Reijers, H.A., van der Aals,
W.: Quality Metrics for Business Process Models. In: Fischer, L. (ed.)
BPM & Workflow Handbook. Methods, concepts, case studies and
standards in business process management and workflow. Future
Strategies, Lighthouse Point, Fla (2007)
[35] Yan, Z., Dijkman, R., Grefen, P.: Fast Business Process Similarity
Search with Feature-Based Similarity Estimation. In: Dillon, T., Herrero,
P. (eds.) On the move to meaningful internet systems: OTM 2010.
Confederated international conferences: CoopIS, IS, DOA and
ODBASE, Hersonissos, Crete, Greece, October 2010 ; proceedings, part
I, pp. 60-77. Springer, Berlin (2010)
[36] Kunze, M., Weske, M.: Metric Trees for Efficient Similarity Search in
Large Process Model Repositories. In: Zur M├╝hlen, M., Su, J. (eds.)
Business Process Management Workshops. International Workshops and
Education Track. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2011)
[37] La Rosa, M., Dumas, M., Käärik, R. and Dijkman, R.: Merging Business
Process Models. Extended Version, BPM Center Report BPM-09-22,
BPMcenter.org, bpmcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/reports/2009/BPM-
09-22.pdf, last accessed 30.01.2012
[38] Marwane El Kharbili, Sebastian Stein, Ivan Markovic, Elke
Pulverm├╝ller: Towards a Framework for Semantic Business Process
Compliance Management. In: Proceedings of the 1st International
Workshop on Governance, Risk and Compliance - Applications in
Information Systems (GRCIS'08) held in conjunction with the CAiSE'08
Conference, pp. 1-15. Vol-339. CEUR Workshop Proceedings (2008)
@article{"International Journal of Business, Human and Social Sciences:49879", author = "Bernhard G. Humm and Janina Fengel", title = "Assessing Semantic Consistency of Business Process Models", abstract = "Business process modeling has become an accepted
means for designing and describing business operations. Thereby,
consistency of business process models, i.e., the absence of modeling
faults, is of upmost importance to organizations. This paper presents
a concept and subsequent implementation for detecting faults in
business process models and for computing a measure of their
consistency. It incorporates not only syntactic consistency but also
semantic consistency, i.e., consistency regarding the meaning of
model elements from a business perspective.", keywords = "Business process modeling, model analysis,semantic consistency, Semantic Web", volume = "6", number = "6", pages = "1053-6", }
