The Role of Semantic Annotations in Business Process Modelling

Semantically annotating business processes is about enriching the elements of a process description (e.g., activities, events) with annotations taken from an ontology defining the domain semantics of the elements of the process. Semantic annotations enable to provide business analysts with tools and services that, by exploiting automated reasoning and inference engines, facilitate the analysis, search and validation of business processes. However, besides the benefits deriving from these automated services, semantic annotations have further unexplored implications on the modelling of business processes. In this paper we present a principled experimental user evaluation showing, as main outcomes, that semantic annotations also directly impact (i) on the modelling process, suggesting that they favour a more accurate and careful design of the models, and (ii) on the resulting process models, as the models obtained using semantic annotations are qualitatively better than those obtained without using them.