A. Bögl, M. Karlinger, Ch. Schütz, M. Schrefl, G. Pomberger: Exploiting Semantic Activity Labels to Facilitate Consistent Specialization of Abstract Process ActivitiesProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science (SOFSEM 2015), Pec pod Snezkou, Czech Republic, January 24-29, 2015.
Designing business processes from scratch is an intricate and challenging task for process modellers. For this reason, the reuse of process patterns has become an integral part of process modelling in order to deal with recurring design issues in a given domain when modelling new business processes and variants thereof. The specialization of abstract process activities remains a key issue in process pattern reuse. Depending on the intended purpose of process pattern reuse, the specialization of abstract process activities typically ranges from the substitution of abstract process activities with sub-processes to the substitution of activity labels with specialized labels. The specialization of abstract process activities through label specialization has been hardly investigated so far in the business process community. The approach presented in this paper achieves consistent specialization of abstract process activities by ensuring consistent specialization of activity labels through exploitation of semantic activity labels as introduced in previous work. Semantic activity labels encode the linguistic meaning of process activities and thereby facilitate the establishment of consistency criteria based on the implicit semantics captured by activity labels.