As we saw in the previous section, BPMN notation is not tied to a specific machinereadable
format but there are several machine-readable formats not yet standard.
In our research work, we explored several alternatives before choosing a language
to represent processes; finally, we chose to use ontology in an innovative way: Our
use of ontology is different from the traditional Semantic Web where ontology
describes, in general, a domain of knowledge. We adopt both the ontology and the
concept of metamodel: Ontology is, in our research work, the language to represent
both the BPMN metamodel (that we develop) and the process model starting from
the metamodel. The ontological language used in our research work is OWL (World
Wide Web Consortium, 2004a): a text language without graphical notation.
To understand the following part of our study we introduce an overview about
BPMN notation, next a brief definition of ontology and of the semantic languages,
and finally, we present the concept of metamodel.
A Des gn Tool for Bus ness Process Des gn and Representat on
Copyright ?© 2007, Idea Group Inc.
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