Modeling industrial business processes for querying and retrieving using OWL+SWRL

"Process modeling forms a core activity in many organizations in which different entities and stakeholders interact for smooth operation and management of enterprises. There have been few work on semantically labeling business processes using OWL-DL that formalize business process structure and query them. However, all these methods suffer from few limitations such as lack of a modular approach of ontology design, no guarantee of a consistent ontology development with TBox and ABox axioms and no provision of combining control flow relations of the main process and its sub-processes. In this work, we propose an approach for labeling and specifying business processes by using hybrid programs which offers modular ontology design, consistent ontology design of each module and unified control flow for process and its sub-processes. This formalism of hybrid programs integrates ontology specified in OWL-DL with SWRL (Semantic Web Rules Language) rules. Further we report on our experimental effort on modeling industrial business processes with this hybrid formalism. We also present a case study of an industrial business process to illustrate our modeling approach which can aid in business knowledge management."