A. Bögl, G. Pomberger, M. Schrefl, N. Weber: Semantic Annotation of EPC Models in Engineering Domains to Facilitate an Automated Identification of Common Modelling Practices, Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2008), Springer Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Volume 19, Springer Berlin, Heidelberg, 2009.
An automated identification of common modeling practices from EPC (Event-Driven Process Chain) models requires to perform a semantic analysis of EPC functions and events. The semantic analysis faces the problem that an essential part of the EPC semantics is bound to natural language expressions in functions and events with undefined process semantics. The semantic annotation of natural language expressions provides an adequate approach to tackle this problem. This paper introduces a novel approach that enables an automated semantic annotation of EPC functions and events. It employs semantic patterns to analyze the textual structure of natural language expressions and to relate them to instances of a reference ontology. Thus, semantically annotated EPC model elements are input for subsequent semantic analysis that identifies common modeling practices.