Towards an ontology-driven framework for workflow analysis

Workflow management and the the whole field of business process management has seen a lot of research interest. This interest has evolved from the initial quest to automate manufacturing processes to the formalization of process models. The reason for this interest can arguably be attributed to the fact that process models form the core of workflow management systems. A plethora of modelling languages and notations have been created through the years, albeit with dominance of proprietary languages that has been argued to be lacking in terms of having formal semantics. The informal languages have seen more adoption at the expense of those that are termed "academic languages" even though academic languages are believed to be more formal. This paper considers the aspects of model transformation with the intension to bridge the gap between modelling and analysis. The paper proposes a semantic approach (using ontologies) to both the mapping and transformation of business process models written in one language (source) to another (target).