Extended Ontology-Based Process Management Architecture

摘要

Process management is a technology used to design, enact, control, and analyze business processes. Today although workflow management systems are readily available and a large number of literatures present improvements in business process management, the reuse ratio of knowledge involved in process is low and most of organizations cannot reuse existing knowledge effectively. In this paper we propose an extended ontology-based process management architecture. Through analyzing the process characters, we identify six ontologies in the process management, including process ontology, organization ontology, resource ontology, knowledge ontology, object ontology and constraint ontology. OWL language has been used to describe each element in the ontology. Based on these six ontologies, a four-level process management architecture is presented and described in detail to show how it can work to reuse the context-related knowledge in process execution. The main contribution of this paper is to achieve knowledge reuse in process management.