Combining a Domain Ontology and MDD Technologies to Create and Validate Business Process Models

The business process models are a primary artifact in the software development process. However, usually they are described only in terms of activities and events. This leads to incomplete business process descriptions because relevant domain information could be not included. Moreover, commonly the business processes are represented by means of semiformal notations which make difficult their validation. Summarizing, despite the relevance of business process models, they are usually incomplete or have errors. The adoption of formal languages is a suitable alternative to validate and analyze business process descriptions. In that sense, the ontologies are a formal language based on description logics which have been widely adopted to represent and analyze knowledge of diverse domains. Nevertheless, this could be a difficult language for some of those involved in describing business processes. The adoption of a Model-driven development (MDD) approach, could make it possible to combine formal and semiformal models to represent and validate business process descriptions. Therefore, this paper aims to introduce an approach based on MDD and ontologies to describe, validate and analyze business processes. In this approach, the processes are described in a graphical notation which can be easily understood for all participants in the process description. Then this process is transformed into an ontology and some additional domain information is added. This new ontological model can be semantically validated with the support of reasoners. A study case to demonstrate the applicability of the approach is provided.