Ontology-based Semantic Matching for Business Process Management

A company's competitiveness relies heavily on its business processes, and thus the need to execute business processes with agility and efficiency is ever-increasing. However, examination of current practice of business process management reveals the problem that it does not satisfy the need and the main reason for the problem is that sufficient semantic information associated with business processes is not included in the definition of business processes. This paper aims to build semantic business process space, which stores such semantic information as various generic and specific ontologies and to illustrate how such semantic information can be utilized when searching for a proper business process, which is the most essential element for the successful implementation of business process management. To that end, we have extended existing semantic matching method that matches only functional properties to a new one which matches non-functional properties as well as functional ones. As a way of validating our approach, we have shown how semantic business process space can be built from a part of the sales order process adopted from SAP R/3 ERP application and illustrated semantic matching using an example. We believe that this study will give practitioners a clear insight into implementing efficient business process management.