From Organizational Guidelines to Business Process Models: Exploratory Case for an Ontology Based Methodology

Ontologies and process models are two essential artifacts of enterprises. They are used for creating knowledge, enabling a shared understanding within a domain and developed by utilizing organizational resources such as guidelines, regulations and policies which are considered as unstructured text. Although organizations frequently have guidelines in natural language, extracting the roles, activities, information carriers, business rules and the relationship, for modelling requires significant time and effort. To address this problem, we suggest discovering the process ontology from organizational guidelines and using this ontology to generate process models. This way, not only will the required effort and time be minimized, but the precision and semantic quality of the business process models and their consistency with the process ontology will be improved. This paper presents an exploratory case study designed and conducted to develop such a methodology. We discuss the results and identify potential improvement opportunities.