Business process concern documentation and evolution

Business processes can be very large and can contain many different concerns, scattered across the process and tangled with other concerns. Crosscutting concerns are difficult to find, locate and modify in a consistent way, thus making process maintenance and reuse hard, even for business experts. In this report, we propose a method to support business designers when they need to document existing crosscutting concerns and when they work on their evolution. We have adapted and applied available techniques for crosscutting concern browsing, mining and refactoring to business process models. More precisely, we propose to enrich BPMN process elements with semantic annotations taken from a domain ontology. We support ontology creation or enrichment in the given business domain. We introduce a visual query language, which allows business designers to quantify over processes and reason over the ontology. We use a mechanism for semi-automatic crosscutting concern mining and we support consistent evolution of crosscutting concerns, once these are modularized separately from the principal process flow.