A knowledge representation formalism for semantic business process management

Business process models are increasingly used to create clarity about the logical sequence of activities in public and private organizations belonging to different industries and areas. To improve Business Process Management (BPM), semantic technologies (like ontologies, reasoners, and semantic Web services) should be integrated in BPM tools in order to enable semantic BPM. Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM) approaches and tools aim at allowing more efficient and effective business process management across complex organizations. By semantic BPM decision makers can get transparent, fast, and comprehensive view of relevant business processes for better analyzing and driving processes. In defining semantic BPM tools aimed at improving the quality of process models and subsequent process analyses, a key aspect to take into account is to represent in combined way static knowledge regarding a specific application domain (i.e. domain ontologies) and dynamic knowledge related to process schemas and instances that are typically performed in a given domain. For example, in the health care domain, where the evidence-based medicine has contributed to define and apply clinical processes for caring a wide variety of diseases, a process-oriented vision of clinical practices may allow for enhancing patient safety by enabling better risks management capabilities.