A Lightweight Formalism for the Integration of BPMN Models with

Domain Ontologies

Giuseppe Della Penna, Roberto Del Sordo, Benedetto

Intrigila, Nicolò Mezzopera, and Maria Teresa Pazienza AI meets Business Processes

Workshop at the XIII Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence

Turin (Italy), December 6, 2013

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About my Company

• What we do:

Web Applications development

And other things….

• How we do:

Start with process descriptions

Realize the Web Application that implements the process, using in most cases the Webratio Suite as development tool (www.webratio.com)

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The context: describing the process

• We use BPMN to collect information about the business processes and create prototypes to submit to the management;

• Once the process is clarified, we begin to describe the business objects that are used during the process (data model);

• In some cases, a deeper understanding of the domain semantics is required in order to design the data model;

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The context: retrieving the information

• The semantic information is often already available through previously defined ontologies;

• In other cases it is possible to extract the information from the available documentation;

• Finally, using open source tools (like Semantic Turkey: http://semanticturkey.uniroma2.it/) it is possible to build ontologies starting from raw information;

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The context: putting all together

• When working with complex domains…

– Ontologies seem to be a good choice to organize the semantic information needed to build the data model;

– BPMN allows to describe the flow of events and tasks in a very natural way.

• So why not integrate the two description approaches?

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The approach

• Rather than directly insert semantic annotations in the BPMN, we create an integrated view using the SyBeL language;

• SyBeL is an XML based language to specify the behaviour of software systems;

– SyBeL describes the control flow in a way that is very similar to BPMN;

– SyBeL also supports the description of simple data models as structures with properties and actions.

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SyBeL: Behaviour Description Language

• A language that allows to encode processes as flows of events (user-triggered and system-generated);

• Each event is defined by the action to be executed and the variables that store results or parameters;

• Flows can contain conditional branches and unconditional jumps.

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SyBeL: Domain Description Language

• A language that allows to declare data structures and types;

• Five basic simple types (string, number, boolean, binary and any) and two type constructors (collections and entity types);

• Entity types are sets of recursively typed properties and parametric actions;

• Collections are lists of recursive typed objects;

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SyBeL: Type system and semantics

• The SyBeL type system was designed with semantics in mind:

– SyBeL entities can be seen as a programmer-friendly view of ontologies;

– Ontology attributes and relations are encoded using properties, actions and type derivation;

– The semantic connection is explicited by the “modelReference” attribute that can be used on entity types, properties and actions;

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Putting all together with SyBeL

• Use SyBeL behaviour description language to encode the BPMN-defined process without loss of information;

• Use the SyBeL domain description language to extract information from the ontologies, build data structures with semantic annotations and assign a type to each element referenced by the process;

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The Case Study

• We considered Mediation as a relevant interest case study (Condominium Dispute);

• Mediation aims to ease the access to justice and reduce the overhead of the civil courts, trying to reach an agreement between the parties;

• Mediation is a complex process: in the case study we considered just the initial phase;

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The initial phase sub-process

• The “proposer” party starts the mediation process by creating a new application request through dedicated online portal.

• The proposer attaches all the needed supporting documentation to the application;

• The coordinator evaluates the completeness of the documentation and assigns the mediation to a mediator, possibly including also a group of experts in the case of very complex cases;

• If the documentation is incomplete or incorrect, the application is sent back to the proposer

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BPMN of the initial phase sub-process

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The ontological aspects

• In many cases, the proposer may request mediation without the support of a lawyer, thus the produced documentation may be invalid or be incomplete;

• A system to support the proposer may be based on an ontological description of the condominium disputes;

• The ontologies can connect different types of dispute to the evidences and documentation required to facilitate the mediator decision

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The simplified ontology

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SyBeL modelling: Data model

• Using the SyBeL tools we produced the data model needed to support the process;

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SyBeL Data Model: graphical view

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SyBeL modelling: behaviour

• The BPMN steps are transformed in actions executed on the domain entities;

• BPMN process branches are encoded as alternative flows;

• Each event can be textually described to better link to the corresponding BPMN step;

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SyBeL behaviour fragment

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SyBeL modelling: artifacts

• The SyBeL tools also provide automatic generation of useful documents, as an example we produced HTML process documentation;

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SyBeL HTML process documentation

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Conclusions

• In most cases it is necessary to add semantic information to process description to define the target domain;

• We can assume semantic information was always described in ontologies;

• Instead of directly integrating the BPMN with semantic information, we use SyBeL modeling language to merge process information with ontologies;

• Using the tools provided in SyBeL we can produce a variety of useful artifacts and documents.

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A Lightweight Formalism for the Integration of BPMN Models with

Domain Ontologies

Thank you for your attention

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