An Adapted Ontology for a Generalized Riva-Driven Business Process Architecture

Abstract

Riva is a Business Process Architecture (BPA) modelling approach that has been used to model key business processes for specific organizational boundaries based on the brainstorming of Essential Business Entities (EBEs). During its early stages, Riva relies heavily on brainstorming the EBEs from stakeholders. However, it does not provide a systematic process for deriving generalized BPA models from multiple heterogeneous sources. Furthermore, when deriving processes from the identified Riva-EBEs, Riva identifies Case Processes (CPs), Case Management Processes (CMPs), and Case Strategy Processes (CSPs). However, the Riva literature mainly supports modelling the CPs, CMPs, and the relationships between them. It does not focus on modelling the CSPs nor their related relationships. Accordingly, Riva has been semantically-enriched by the srBPA ontology component. But this semantic enrichment was limited to the original aspects of Riva and does not address the raised issues. This paper presents an adaptation to the semantic enrichment of Riva (an adapted srBPA ontology) to include the semantic representation of the CSPs and their related relationships, in addition to supporting the representation of BPA concepts and resolving semantic heterogeneity resulting from electing the EBEs from multiple heterogeneous sources. The proposed adapted ontology has been evaluated by checking its consistency, completeness, and redundancy.