QuBPAL: Querying Business Process Knowledge

We present a query language, called QuBPAL, for retrieving knowledge from repositories of business processes represented in the BPAL (Business Process Abstract Language) framework. BPAL combines in a single modeling framework the procedural and the ontological aspects of business processes. This is done by providing a uniform, logic-based representation of both the workflow, with its associated procedural semantics, and the domain knowledge that captures the meaning of the entities participating in the process. This uniform representation is achieved by using Logic Programming (LP) as an intermediate language, to which we map BPMN models and OWL/RDF definitions. QuBPAL queries allow combining structural, behavioral, and domain-related knowledge and hence enable reasoning about the process from all these perspectives.