Towards a semantic enrichment of configurable process models

In recent years, the concept of Semantic business process management has attracted significant research work, with the emergence of semantic web technologies (SW), which aimed to describe resources in a formal representation with clearly defined semantics in order to be machine-readable. Enriching business process with semantics improves the representation of processes and permits the automation of different tasks such as modeling, configuration, evolution, and promotes more flexible and adaptive solutions according to business requirement changes. Nowadays, the key concept of reuse in Business Process Management is the Configurable Process Model (CPM) solution which is an important approach for reusing and customizing business process models with a set of process variants. However, existing approaches in CPM lack of semantic representation. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based approach for enriching Configurable Process Models with semantics, as a first step towards the enhancement of the CPM evolution process. © 2014 IEEE.