Semantic queries in BPMN 2.0: A contemporary method for information retrieval

The rapid evolution of technology in Management Information Systems has enabled easy access to a huge amount of complex and specialized business information. The vast amount of business information has created the need for investigating ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of information retrieval techniques for querying business information. Among the different types of business information, information about business processes has been leveraged with dedicated languages, methods and tools. Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) is an international standard for modeling business processes. In this paper, we first develop the appropriate business process models of a complex real-life scenario using BPMN and we then represent process models in the form of an ontology business process model. We, next, query the two models with the same queries: the BPMN model using a query language for object-oriented databases and the semantic model using the SPARQL ontology-based search language. We compare the two query methods, discuss the results and explain the benefits of using semantics-based information retrieval techniques when dealing with business process information.