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2025 Volume 40
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RESEARCH ARTICLE   Open Access    

A business process meta-model: construction from the literature and ontological clarifications

  • Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, 39100, Bolzano, Italy

  • University of Trento, 38123, Trento, Italy

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  • Abstract: While modern definitions of business processes exist and are shared in the business process management (BPM) community, a commonly agreed meta-model is still missing. Nonetheless, several different business process meta-models have been proposed and discussed in the literature, which look at business process models from different perspectives, focusing on different aspects and often using different labels for denoting the same element or element relation.In this paper, we extend and consolidate an effort of building a business process meta-model starting from elements and relations discovered inspecting relevant literature through a systematic literature review. The obtained literature-based business process meta-model, which is on purpose built to disclose critical issues, is then inspected, compared to a previous, more restricted, version, and discussed. The analysis confirms a lack of attention to some crucial business process elements, as well as the presence of some unclear relations and subsumption cycles. Moreover it brings about new issues and inconsistencies in the meta-models proposed in literature, which we address - at least in part - using an ontological analysis.
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    Greta Adamo, Chiara Di Francescomarino, Chiara Ghidini. 2025. A business process meta-model: construction from the literature and ontological clarifications. The Knowledge Engineering Review 40(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888925000049
    Greta Adamo, Chiara Di Francescomarino, Chiara Ghidini. 2025. A business process meta-model: construction from the literature and ontological clarifications. The Knowledge Engineering Review 40(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888925000049
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RESEARCH ARTICLE   Open Access    

A business process meta-model: construction from the literature and ontological clarifications

  • Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, 39100, Bolzano, Italy

  • University of Trento, 38123, Trento, Italy

  • Received: 15 February 2023
  • Revised: 05 May 2024
  • Accepted: 08 April 2025
  • Published online: 20 June 2025
The Knowledge Engineering Review  40,  2025, 40(1)  |  Cite this article

Abstract: Abstract: While modern definitions of business processes exist and are shared in the business process management (BPM) community, a commonly agreed meta-model is still missing. Nonetheless, several different business process meta-models have been proposed and discussed in the literature, which look at business process models from different perspectives, focusing on different aspects and often using different labels for denoting the same element or element relation.In this paper, we extend and consolidate an effort of building a business process meta-model starting from elements and relations discovered inspecting relevant literature through a systematic literature review. The obtained literature-based business process meta-model, which is on purpose built to disclose critical issues, is then inspected, compared to a previous, more restricted, version, and discussed. The analysis confirms a lack of attention to some crucial business process elements, as well as the presence of some unclear relations and subsumption cycles. Moreover it brings about new issues and inconsistencies in the meta-models proposed in literature, which we address - at least in part - using an ontological analysis.

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    • It considers 65 primary studies which include the thirty-six of the original SLR.

    • https://www.omg.org/spec/UML/About-UML/.

    • The list of symbols of EPCs can vary, depending on the specific system implementation. The analysis and diagrams contained in this paper refer to the description provided in Scheer et al. (2005).

    • https://dblp.uni-trier.de/.

    • https://www.scopus.com/search/form.uri?display=basic.

    • https://login.webofknowledge.com/error/Error?PathInfo=2F Error=IPError.

    • https://link.springer.com/conference/bpm.

    • https://link.springer.com/conference/caise.

    • The actual implementation of query (1) in the syntax of the three repositories is shown in Table 1 of Adamo et al. (2021).

    • By taking into account some of the problems raised in the analysis of the original elements and relations and the corresponding devised solutions, the element classification used for the original meta-model elements has been slightly changed. Specifically, (i) two different macro-elements have been identified for the concepts related to the label ‘event’: event $\grave{a}$-la BPMN, grouping elements with a semantics close to the notion of exogenous activity, as the element event-BPMN, and state grouping elements with a semantics close to the notion of state, as the element event-EPC and (ii) the label ‘resource’ has been classified as resource (agentive), when the resource has a clear agentive nature, resource (non-agentive) when the resource has a clear non-agentive nature, and resource (generic), when the resource has both an agentive and non-agentive nature or it is unclear from the meta-model whether the resource refers to an agentive or to a non-agentive resource. Also, some minor changes have been applied with respect to the elements reported in Adamo et al. (2021) to rectify factual data collection errors.

    • Note that five elements belong to more than one macro-element: information, position, role, (software) application and process participant

    • https://www.omg.org/spec/BPDM.

    • The list of the main syntactic variants for each element and the correspondence between each element and the primary studies in which it appears can be found in the Zenodo link (file name: ‘metamodel_elements’).

    • The overlap between the two macro-elements actor and resource can be due to the use of the term ‘human resource’ in organizational sciences, which may lead to classify humans as resources.

    • For the sake of simplicity, the resource (unclear) class reported in Adamo et al. (2021) has been included in the class resource (both) and renamed as resource (generic).

    • Examples are event-BPMN and event-EPC, which together reach around 25% of occurrence in meta-models), and resource (agentive), resource (non-agentive), and resource (generic), reaching together around 25% of meta-models’ occurrence, as well.

    • The complete list of the relations with the associated cardinality and references can be found in the Zenodo link (file name ‘metamodels_relations’).

    • Notoriously, the definition of agency is largely debated in the artificial intelligence field. For our purposes, we take the view that an agent is an entity with sensors, actuators, and the capability to act on itself or on the environment (Russell & Norvig 1995).

    • function does not appear in the LB meta-model because it did not appear often enough to meet the threshold.

    • If event-EPC is a stative element it cannot activate or cause anything by itself, and this conflicts with its triggering nature.

    • These aspects were somehow present also in the original meta-model but not carefully investigated

    • This is not surprising. Indeed, in the BPM community, resources are defined in many different ways. See for example, https://genie137.gitbooks.io/fundementalsofbpmsummary/content/Chapter3/chapter3.4.html.

    • An analysis concerning types of business process activities can be found in Adamo et al. (2020). Generally, speaking, here we focus on resources that are assigned to activities within the process owner boundaries.

    • https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/.

    • The work in Adamo et al. (2018a) introduces also two types of meta-goals of a process. However in this section we focus only on the notions of goals related to the process itself.

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    • This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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    Cite this article
    Greta Adamo, Chiara Di Francescomarino, Chiara Ghidini. 2025. A business process meta-model: construction from the literature and ontological clarifications. The Knowledge Engineering Review 40(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888925000049
    Greta Adamo, Chiara Di Francescomarino, Chiara Ghidini. 2025. A business process meta-model: construction from the literature and ontological clarifications. The Knowledge Engineering Review 40(1), doi: 10.1017/S0269888925000049
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