BBO: BPMN 2.0 Based Ontology for Business Process Representation

Any industrial company has its own business processes, which is a number of related tasks that have to be executed to reach well-defined goals. In order to analyze, improve, simulate and automate these processes, it is essential to represent them in a formal way. The activity of representing business processes is known as Business Process Modelling (BPM); it is an active research area that attracts more and more attention with the emergence of Industry 4.0. Semantic Web technologies, especially ontologies, are promising means to advance BPM and to realize the Industry 4.0 vision. In this scope, we developed the BBO (BPMN 2.0 Based Ontology) ontology for business process representation, by reusing existing ontologies and meta-models like BPMN 2.0, the state-of-the-art meta-model for business process representation. We evaluated BBO using schema metrics, which showed that it was a deep and rich ontology with a variety of relationships. Thanks to a use case, we illustrated the ability of BBO to represent real business processes in a fine-grained way and to express and answer the competency questions identified at the specification stage.