Ontology-Based Process Modelling -- Will we live to see it?

TL;DR

This paper examines the gap between the theoretical potential of ontology-based process modelling (OBPM) and its limited industry adoption, highlighting the need for reducing manual effort and advancing research to enable practical implementation.

Contribution

The paper identifies key requirements for successful OBPM adoption and assesses current research progress, revealing significant gaps and the need for further development.

Findings

Research on facilitating OBPM is still limited.

High manual effort hinders practical OBPM adoption.

Urgent need to extend existing approaches.

Abstract

In theory, ontology-based process modelling (OBPM) bares great potential to extend business process management. Many works have studied OBPM and are clear on the potential amenities, such as eliminating ambiguities or enabling advanced reasoning over company processes. However, despite this approval in academia, a widespread industry adoption is still nowhere to be seen. This can be mainly attributed to the fact, that it still requires high amounts of manual labour to initially create ontologies and annotations to process models. As long as these problems are not addressed, implementing OBPM seems unfeasible in practice. In this work, we therefore identify requirements needed for a successful implementation of OBPM and assess the current state of research w.r.t. these requirements. Our results indicate that the research progress for means to facilitate OBPM are still alarmingly low and there needs to be urgent work on extending existing approaches.