An Ontology Acquisition Method for Business Process Modelling and Improvement

The idea of ontology-based approach to business process modeling is certainly viable. However, according to the semantic representation deficiency of the process models, it´s hard to realize the ontology auto-acquisition to support the model mapping from domain model to IT-specific PIM. This paper presents an ontology-activity-based model acquisition approach to improve business process modelling. It proposes that the key elements in business process modeling are activities and should be the basis in constructing the domain ontology. Aiming to provide the key description capability for the process model, it discusses the hierarchy of the model by adding the structure dimension between the information tier and process tier to describe the relationships of the object and the process from the viewpoint of activity structure attributes. It also describes a model-relevance-calculation-based optimal method for extracting ontology activities from the process meta-models. Finally, the ontology activity identification and acquisition approach is discussed.