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International Conference on Business Process Management

BPM 2019: Business Process Management Workshops pp 19–31Cite as

Description Logics and Specialization for Structured BPMN

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 362))

Abstract

The literature contains arguments for the benefits of representing and reasoning with BPMN processes in (OWL) ontologies, but these proposals are not able to reason about their dynamics. We introduce a new Description Logic, sBPMprocessDL, to represent the behavioral semantics of (block) structured BPMN. It supports reasoning about process concepts based on their execution traces.

Starting from the traditional notion of subsumption in Description Logics (including sBPMprocessDL), we further investigate the notions of specialization and inheritance, as a way to help build and abbreviate large libraries of processes in an ontology, which are needed in many applications.

We also provide formal evidence for the intuition that features of structured BPMN diagrams such as AND-gates and sub-processes can provide substantial benefits for their succinctness. The same can be true when moving from a structured to an equivalent unstructured version.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This can be used as another argument in favor of Structured BPM: several papers [12, 22] have shown how to represent the trace semantics of declarative BPMs, such as declare, by mapping to regular expressions.

  2. 2.

    This is a variant of the semantics of one of the plan DLs, \(RegExp(\{ \,\cdot \,,\,\sqcup \,,^*,\,\#\, \})\), described in [7, 9].

  3. 3.

    For brevity, we omit henceforth the beginning, including Initiate, EstablishWho,...

  4. 4.

    We use here pattern matching on terms in the style of modern functional languages such as Standard ML, Haskell, etc.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA

    Alexander Borgida, Varvara Kalokyri & Amélie Marian

Authors
  1. Alexander Borgida
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  2. Varvara Kalokyri
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  3. Amélie Marian
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Correspondence to Alexander Borgida .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy

    Chiara Di Francescomarino

  2. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Remco Dijkman

  3. University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Uwe Zdun

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Borgida, A., Kalokyri, V., Marian, A. (2019). Description Logics and Specialization for Structured BPMN. In: Di Francescomarino, C., Dijkman, R., Zdun, U. (eds) Business Process Management Workshops. BPM 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 362. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37453-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37453-2_3

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-37453-2

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