2 BACKGROUND
2.1 BPMN Language
BPMN (ISO/IEC 19510. 2013), adopted by the OMG
group, is the most used notation for modelling
business processes (BP). The graphical objects are
organized into several categories: Activity, Data,
connecting objects (sequence/message flows),
participants (lane, pool). An activity can be a simple
representing Task or composed representing a sub-
process. In BPMN 2.0, there is different Task types
such as service Task which is used when an external
service is called to perform a task. Send task is
designed to send a message to an activity, process, or
lane, while receive task is designed to wait for a
message from an activity, process, or lane. Activities
and processes often need data objects and data store
in order to be realized. Connecting Objects (sequence
flow, message flow) connect the Flow Objects to each
other or other information to create the basic structure
of a BP. Participants represent Pools and Lanes
elements. A pool can be a specific entity or a role. It
is divided into one or more lanes.
2.2 Business Context
Before introducing the business context, we extend
the BPMN source meta-model presented in (Khlif et
al., 2018) (See Figure 1).
Figure 1: BPMN meta-model.
For each BPMN element, (Khlif et al., 2018)
associate a Description that adds a specific
information to BPMN elements in terms of the
relationships between them. The ExtendedAttributes
class specifies the properties of each BPMN element.
In (Khlif et al., 2018), the authors describe the
business context to annotate different BPMN
elements. The business context add semantic and
structural information specific to all BPMN elements.
Activity node can be simple, representing a task,
or composed that expressing a sub-process. We
enhance each activity with a business context that
contains the following information: 1) the unique
activity identifier (ID), 2) Lane ID which is the
unique identifier of the lane containing the activity, 3)
Performer (actor) ID that express the unique identifier
of the actor responsible of performing the activity, 4)
Upstream and downstream ID is the unique identifier
of the activity on which this activity directly depends,
5) extended attributes which can be a pure value or a
complex one representing a business entity, 6)
activity description indicating the relationships
between the business entities and/or the activity’s
extended complex attributes, 7) resources expressing
the data objects/stores that are required by an activity
to fulfil its goal. The resources are described in terms
of name, extended attributes and description.
The data objects/stores’ extended attributes and
description have the same semantic than the activity’s
extended attributes and description.
The lane and pool elements are described with the
following informations: 1) Unique identifier of lane
(IDL)/pool (IDP), 2) their labels, 3) Lane Description
(LD)/Pool Description (PD) to indicates the semantic
relation between the lane/pool and 4) the tasks/data
object or stores (respectively the lanes or tasks/data
object or stores) that belong to it, 5) Extended
Attributes to describe the lane/pool properties. As the
same of the extended attributes related to the activity,
each one can be a pure value or complex. The
annotated BPMN elements will be transformed into
OWL2 components.
2.3 Related Work
Many researchers proposed a number of methods for
transforming a Business Process Model to the OWL2
ontology (Annane et al., 2019) (BPMN-onto, 2019).
In this context, (Annane et al., 2019) developed
the BBO (BPMN 2.0 Based Ontology) ontology for
business process representation, by reusing existing
ontologies and meta-models like BPMN 2.0. Another
ontology (BPMN-onto, 2019) has been automatically
extracted from BPMN 2.0, but there is no
documentation about how it was generated.
Moreover, this ontology contains no annotations and
less information than the specification document.
(Figueiredo and Oliveira, 2018) propose a systematic
process for the automatic generation of an ontology
from a BP model transformed to the XML Process
Definition Language.
(Ternai, et al., 2016) propose an approach to
transform the BP into process ontology and to
combine it with the knowledge base as a domain
ontology in a well-controlled solution.
Overall, the above works focus on transforming