Ontology-Based Business Process Editor in Development

The BPEdit Project has started development of an ontology-based Business Process Editor in the context of an open source project. BPEdit is a software component that enables business experts to query, create and edit Business Process Diagrams (BPDs). BPEdit supports the BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) and makes use of the BPMN symbols. BPMN is a standard notation developed under the auspices of bpmi.org and has already gained broad support in the software industry. Users can graphically define private and collaborative business processes.

Unlike many process modeling tools, BPEdit will enable generation of comprehensive documentation of business processes and executable process definitions in target process definition languages such as XPDL, BPEL, etc.

BPEdit resides on top of an Ontology Editor or Knowledge Base Editor, such as Protégé, and uses the Business Process Management Ontology (BPMO) as its repository. The BPMO holds semantically rich business process definitions in a vendor-neutral format. It provides a comprehensive information model defined with the OWL Web Ontology Language, a W3C Recommendation. OWL is based on RDF (Resource Description Framework) and RDF Schema, the standard data model for machine-processable semantics. The BPMO is made available in an open source fashion, too.

Together, BPEdit and the BPMO will form a top-to-bottom open source solution, which adheres to public standards. In addition, it will provide unprecedented integration of the semantic repository backbone (BPMO) and graphical editing functionality (BPEdit).

Just recently, a Protégé Business Process Converter Plugin to be used in conjunction with BPMO that enables business analysts to generate executable process definitions in XPDL has been released as open source. The implementation will become part of BPEdit. A Converter Plugin that generates BPEL4WS definitions is planned and will also become part of BPEdit.

The BP Converter plugin maybe accessed via the BPEdit homepage at http://bpedit.sourceforge.net .