Semantic Annotation for Process Models: - Department of Computer ...

Chapter 3
State of the Art
This chapter investigates a number of existing process modeling languages and process
ontologies which are often used in industrial business and academic research projects.
Such investigation is intended to seize the most essential concepts and relationships
describing the semantics of process, which construct the basis of the process ontology.
The process ontology is used as the intermediary for the semantic annotation to
build the semantic mapping between different process representations. Semantic annotation
approaches and tools for different types of information are surveyed to identify
requirements of semantic annotation methods and tools.
3.1 Process Modeling Languages
Business Process Modeling (BPM) plays a vital role in the lifecycle of enterprise systems
development. BPM is sometimes known as Business Process Management. Over the
years, the scope of business processes and BPM has broadened. It ranges from process
definition, workflow management system, and integration techniques. For the specification
aspect, process definition is conducted by modeling activities with certain process
modeling language. For the execution aspect, workflow management system is necessary
for the automation and control of process execution based on process models. For
the system aspect, BPM today is an enterprise integration technology complementing
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and other integration APIs.
In the history of business process modeling, numbers of process modeling languages
were created, evolved and new proposals continue to emerge. Some of them cease to
be used because of the evolution of the modeling methodologies, but many of them
are still lively applied. Those process modeling languages exist contemporaneously due
to their special expressive powers to emphasize different aspects for various applicational
purposes. Process modeling languages might be informal, semi-formal or formal.
Informal modeling language is just natural language, which is seldom used in modeling
discipline. Most visual modeling languages are semi-formal modeling languages, in
which there are a set of notations with semantic definitions by meta-models. Formal
modeling languages are those whose semantics are rigidly defined by logic or mathematics.
A semi-formal modeling language is generally easier to understand than a formal
language, while the latter can enable the computation of model semantics.
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