A Unified View of Business Process Modelling Languages 1 Farideh Heidari 1 , Pericles Loucopoulos 2 , Frances Brazier 1 , Joseph Barjis 1 1 System Engineering Section, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands {f.heidari,f.m.brazier,j.barjis}@tudelft.nl 2 Department of Informatics and Telematics, Harokopio University of Athens, Greece p.loucopoulos@hua.gr Abstract. Understanding and specifying business processes is a challenge. Many different approaches have been developed, each with their own specific business process modelling languages designed to meet a business specific requirements. In practice, however, multiple business process languages are often being used within one and the same enterprise. This paper proposes a universal and language independent abstraction of the concepts of today's mainstream business process modelling languages, in a unified ontology based on an analysis of seven popular business process modelling approaches. Generic concepts are identified and a unified meta-model designed. An ontological analysis of the representational capability of this meta-model is examined in relation to the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology. This meta-model is open to further extensions such as incorporating requirements or extending into a knowledge base. Keywords: Business process; Business process ontology; Unified business process meta-model; Business process Modelling; BWW ontology. 1 Introduction Business Process Modelling (BPM) is currently not only of core importance to the development of software systems [1, 2] but also in presenting, analysing and improving business processes [3] within enterprises. Business process models are domain specific conceptual models that support presentation and integration of business process requirements within an enterprise. Linking business process requirements with business process model concepts enables IT and business experts to define their requirements collaboratively at a common abstract level [4] during the earliest stage of design and development of information systems. Annotation of business process model concepts with related information artefacts using domains’ 1 Internal University Report: HUA-PL-2013-004 (30.11.2012) © F Heidari, P Loucopoulos, F Brazier, J Barjis