Business Processes and Their Participants: An Ontological Perspective

Business process modelling (BPM) notations, such as BPMN, UML-Activity Diagram (UML-AD), EPC and CMMN describe processes using a graphical representation of process-relevant entities and their interplay. Despite the wide literature on the comparison between different modelling languages, the BPM community still lacks an ontological characterisation of process elements, among which process participants, that is, the main entities involved in a business process. Purpose of this paper is to start filling this gap by providing an ontological analysis of business processes from the standpoint of process participants. In particular, by discussing participants common to languages such as BPMN, EPC, UML-AD, and CMMN we characterize them on the basis of their ontological properties.