Ontology-based Representation and Reasoning on Process Models: A Logic Programming Approach

We propose a framework grounded in Logic Programming for representing and reasoning about business processes from both the procedural and ontological point of views. In particular, our goal is threefold: (1) define a logical language and a formal semantics for process models enriched with ontology-based annotations; (2) provide an effective inference mechanism that supports the combination of reasoning services dealing with the structural definition of a process model, its behavior, and the domain knowledge related to the participating business entities; (3) implement such a theoretical framework into a process modeling and reasoning platform. To this end we define a process ontology coping with a relevant fragment of the popular BPMN modeling notation. The behavioral semantics of a process is defined as a state transition system by following an approach similar to the Fluent Calculus, and allows us to specify state change in terms of preconditions and effects of the enactment of activities. Then we show how the procedural process knowledge can be seamlessly integrated with the domain knowledge specified by using the OWL 2 RL rule-based ontology language. Our framework provides a wide range of reasoning services, including CTL model checking, which can be performed by using standard Logic Programming inference engines through a goal-oriented, efficient, sound and complete evaluation procedure. We also present a software environment implementing the proposed framework, and we report on an experimental evaluation of the system, whose results are encouraging and show the viability of the approach.