Towards an XPDL Compliant Process Ontology

This paper presents initial results on oXPDL, a process interchange ontology based on the standardised XML Process Definition Language (XPDL). XPDL was introduced to allow process model exchange between information systems, most of which are based on proprietary workflow models. Our process interchange ontology oXPDL explicitly models the complete semantics of XPDL process models in a standard Web ontology language. The oXPDL process models may be used for integrated process analysisby querying and reasoning over multiple models and their instances in combination with business rules described in background ontologies, each of which may originate from different information systems.