An approach to the process maps based on semantic web methodologies

Organizations use process mapping as a basic tool to define or analyze how they manage their business. Process mapping methodologies are also used to design better business processes, to improve efficiency and foster productivity and output quality, while reducing business risks. Process maps are usually developed by business analysts and process engineers, which are often highly centralised knowledge resources and generally apply process mapping methodologies based on top down approaches. Business analysts are used to represent process maps using flowcharting tools, or, in case of database supported knowledge bases, using tree-shaped structures. Unfortunately, top-down approaches and both flowchart-based or tree-shaped process knowledge bases lead to process maps which are mainly unable to represent in a complete manner the enterprise knowledge about its processes and generally hinder the sharing and the subsequent reuse of the process maps. In this article we illustrate an alternative approach to represent process maps and business knowledge, based on typical concepts and methodologies from the Semantic Web paradigm (i.e. ontologies, XML based languages and agents), and aimed to allow for the production of complete, meaningful and reusable process maps.