An Ontological Model to Support the Application of Quality Practical Guidelines to Assess Business Process Descriptions

Business process models are a powerful means to show the business view of an organization. These models enhance the common understanding about the process of the organization and represent a key artifact to design information systems. Therefore, detecting and correcting errors in business process models are crucial to prevent errors in these models from spreading to other stages of the software development process. However, several studies have demonstrated that business process models usually have errors. The use of semiformal notations is one of the reasons for this fact, since these notations make the semantic validation of models difficult. Ontologies has become in a suitable solution to represent business process models. Since ontologies are a formal language based on description logics, its adoption enables semantic validation of modes. This paper aims to describe an ontology-based approach to detect errors in business process models. This approach implements a set of practical guidelines to assess the quality of process models. To develop the ontology, a solid methodology was followed. Likewise, the ontology was validated through a recognized method. Some examples that illustrate the applicability and impact of this approach are provided.