Workflow Hierarchical Adaptation Method Using Ontologies

Administrative processes are a type of business process frequently used at civil services and large companies with hierarchical organizations. The workflows of these processes are often defined generically in the level of management or governance of the organization. These workflows must be specialized in the lower levels of the organization hierarchy before they can be used. In addition, any change in the generic workflows must be also propagated to the lower levels. Traditional approaches of workflow specialization do not provide a complete solution to these issues. However, some strategies of ontology evolution can be adapted to solve these problems. In this paper we propose a method that combines approaches of both research areas called Workflow Hierarchical Adaptation Method. This method can be applied to workflows defined in ontologies. Thus, a model and tools for defining and managing workflows based on ontologies are also described in this paper.