Description Logics and Specialization for Structured BPMN.

The literature contains arguments for the benefits of representing and reasoning with BPMN processes in (OWL) ontologies, but these proposals are not able to reason about their dynamics. We introduce a new Description Logic, sBPMPROCESSDL, to represent the behavioral semantics of (block) structured BPMN. It supports reasoning about process concepts based on their execution traces. Starting from the traditional notion of subsumption in Description Logics (including sBPMPROCESSDL), we further investigate the notions of specialization and inheritance, as a way to help build and abbreviate large libraries of processes in an ontology, which are needed in many applications. We also provide formal evidence for the intuition that features of structured BPMN diagrams such as AND-gates and sub-processes can provide substantial benefits for their succinctness. The same can be true when moving from a structured to an equivalent unstructured version.