AMFIBIA: A Meta-model For the Integration of BusIness process modelling Aspects

There is much work on ontologies, meta-models, and interchange formats for business process modelling. The problem, however, is that most of this work is focused on a particular fomalism, is restricted to some particular aspects, or does not cover all phases from business process modelling to workflow management.

The AMFIBIA project aims at an ontology and a meta-model for all concepts in business process modelling. The ontology should capture the basic aspects of business processes and should be open for adding further aspects. Moreover, the ontology should not be biased towards any aspect or towards any formalism. In particular, it should be possible to map different formalisms to this ontology and to integrate different formalisms by the help of this ontology.

The AMFIBIA project was started at the University of Paderborn subsequently to the workshop on XML Interchange Formats for Business Process Management (XML4BPM 2004) in March 2004. At this workshop, a variety of different formats, concepts and techniques for exchanging business process models were presented. This workshop raised our awareness for the importance of identifying and unifying the variety of different formats, formalisms and points of views; and we started developing mechanisms for unifying and integrating different formalims.

By April 2005, we have come up with a first proposal (tr-ri-05-256). Though this proposal is far from being complete, we would be happy to discuss this proposal with you, and we are looking forward to any comments, suggestions or criticism.

Currently, a group of eight students are designing and implementing a first prototype of AMFIBIA in a one year master's project: http://wwwcs.uni-paderborn.de/cs/kindler/Lehre/WS05/PG-AMFIBIA/.

References

Ekkart Kindler: Using the Petri Net Markup Language for Exchanging Business processes - Potential and Limitations.
In M. Nüttgens, J. Mendling: XML4BPM 2004, XML Interchange Formats for Business Process Management, Proceedings March 2004.

Björn Axenath, Ekkart Kindler, Vladimir Rubin: The Aspects of Business Processes: An Open and Formalism Independent Ontology.
Technical Report tr-ri-05-256, April 2005 (preliminary version).

Ekkart Kindler: The Aspects of Business Processes: An open and formalism indpendent architecture. Invited talk in the eJustice Dialogues, Saarbrücken University, June 2005.

Björn Axenath, Ekkart Kindler, and Vladimir Rubin: An Open and Formalism Independent Meta-Model for Business Processes.
In: E. Kindler, M. Nüttgens: Business Process Reference Models. Proceedings of the Workshop on Business Process Reference Models 2005 (BPRM 2005), Satellite event of the third International Conference on Business Process Management, Nancy, France, September 2005. pp. 45-59.