Aligning Business Process Models and Domain Knowledge: A Meta-modeling Approach

In recent years the problems related to modeling and improving business processes have been of growing interest. Indeed, companies are realizing the undeniable impact of a better understanding and management of business processes (BP) on the effectiveness, consistency, and transparency of their business operations. BP modeling aims at a better understanding of processes, allowing deciders to achieve strategic goals of the company. However, inexperienced systems analysts often lack domain knowledge leading and this affects the quality of models they produce. In this paper we propose to support this modeling effort with an approach that uses domain knowledge to improve the semantic quality of BP models. This approach relies on domain ontologies as a mean to capture domain knowledge and on meta-modeling techniques. The main contribution of this paper is threefold: 1) the metamodels describing both a domain ontology and a BP model are described, 2) the alignment between the concepts of both meta-models is defined and illustrated, 3) a set of OCL mapping rules is provided. A simple case study illustrates the process.