Digging into Business Process Meta-models: A First Ontological Analysis

While modern definitions of business processes exist and are shared in the Business Process Management community, a commonly agreed meta-model is still missing. Nonetheless, several different business process meta-models have been recently 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 start from elements and relations discovered inspecting the literature on business process meta-models through a systematic literature review. We then combine these elements and relations to build a business process meta-model. The obtained literature-based business process meta-model, which is on purpose built to disclose criticalities, is then inspected and discussed. The analysis reveals, besides the lack of attention to some crucial business process elements, issues and inconsistencies in the literature meta-models. An ontological analysis is finally carried out and possible solutions to the discovered issues are proposed.