Supporting Ontology-Based Semantic Annotation of Business Processes with Automated Suggestions

Annotation of Business Processes with semantic tags taken from a domain ontology is beneficial to several activities conducted on Business Processes, such as comprehension, documentation, analysis and evolution. On the other hand, the task of semantically annotating Business Processes is time-consuming and far from trivial. The authors support Business Process designers in the annotation of process elements by automatically suggesting candidate concepts. The annotation suggestions are computed on the basis of a similarity measure between the text information associated with process element labels and the ontology concepts. In turn, this requires support for the disambiguation of terms appearing in ontology concepts, which admit multiple linguistic senses, and for ontology extension, when the available concepts are insufficient.