Overcoming expressiveness deficit of business process modeling languages

Y. Wand and R. Weber have suggested that the ontological clarity of the modeling language can be evaluated by comparing the alphabet of this language with the constructs of top level ontology known as Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW). According to them, one of the key success factors of using a given language is its ability to provide the users with a symbol set, which can directly reflect appropriate ontology concepts. However, the ontology is not limited to a thesaurus; it also covers the structure of relations between concepts. It may be assumed that the modeling language must be able to convey these relationships. Therefore, the approach ofY. Wand and R. Weber can be significantly enhanced if the structural relationships among BWW ontology concepts are studied. This paper also makes an attempt to extend the BWW ontology as applied to business process modeling, since in its current form it does not make it possible to represent logical operators and the temporal characteristics. We enhance the BWW ontology with transformations which change mutual properties, they correspond to logical operators. The interpretation of the event concept is modified such that it designates the moment in time when the object state changes. It is demonstrated that external events are connected to each process operation. Thus, the items of temporal logic: the moment in time and time interval between two consecutive events are added. The investigation of relations among enhanced BWW ontology concepts made it possible to substantiate five perspectives of the process model and identify formalisms used for their description, i.e. informational entity-relation diagram; behavioral state transition diagram; transformational dataflow diagram; temporal event graph; logical ordinary Petri nets. Multiple research shows that process modeling languages and notations are not able to display immediately all BWW ontological model concepts, but only part of them. Moreover, the authors of these researches focus their attention on a percentage ratio of modeled and unmodeled concepts, calculate a relative degree of deficit, redundancy, excess and overload. For overcoming the deficit, this paper proposes to model a business process not in one notation but in several correlated diagrams, so that each diagram reveals separate perspectives, and all together they form a coordinated, integrated process description.