A Process Ontology for Business Intelligence

This paper presents oXPDL, a process interchange ontology based on the standardised XML Process Definition Language (XPDL). XPDL was introduced to allow process model exchange between information systems, most of which are based on proprietary workflow models. In its current form, XPDL allows only syntactic vendor-specific extensions without clear semantics, has only limited support for informational and organisational modelling aspects and cannot be interlinked to existing standardised knowledge bases. The process interchange ontology oXPDL explicitly models the complete semantics of XPDL process models in a standard Web ontology language. The oXPDL ontology has a strong focus on the reuse and integration of existing standard ontologies such as PSL, RosettaNet, SUMO and eClassOWL.