© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 K. Gaaloul et al. (Eds.): BPMDS 2015 and EMMSAD 2015, LNBIP 214, pp. 184–199, 2015. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-19237-6_12 Process Fragmentation: An Ontological Perspective Asef Pourmasoumi 1,2() , Mohsen Kahani 2 , Ebrahim Bagheri 1 , and Mohsen Asadi 3 1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada {a.pourmasoumi,bagheri}@ryerson.ca 2 Web Technology Lab, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran kahani@um.ac.ir 3 School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Surrey, Canada masadi@sfu.ca Abstract. Process fragmentation provides the basis for re-usability and process improvement. Various re-searchers have already introduced different defini- tions for what constitutes a reasonable process fragment, and have offered algorithmic support for identifying such fragments. As we will show in this paper, some of these definitions suffer from ambiguity or imprecision. There- fore, the objectives of this paper are twofold: first, we provide an ontological assessment of the various process fragment definitions based on the well-known Bunge’s Ontology and its process representational model, GPM. On this basis, we then extract the most important features of these definitions in order to for- malize a precise definition for process fragments and propose a precise and non-ambiguous definition: morphological fragmentation. We present our work through a case study and report on our observations. Keywords: Process model fragmentation · Ontological theory · Generic process model (GPM) 1 Introduction Organizational mining focuses on discovering organizational structures, social net- works, and resource allocation patterns [1]. Organizational mining was traditionally introduced within a single organization. The growing increase of IT infrastructure needs has led many organizations to reuse or share resources and processes leading to the introduction of cross-organizational mining [2]. Cross-organizational mining considers organization's IT infrastructures from two perspectives. In the first case, different organizations work with each other to perform the same process instances [3]. In the second case, different organizations are separately handling the same process while sharing experiences, knowledge, or a common infrastructure [2]. In this case, each organization could be executing a variant of the same process family, such as the sale process offered by Salesforce.com. In other words, these organizations use the common infrastructures of Saleforce.com for handling their processes. However, they do not execute the exact same process and often customize and build a variation of the sale process. These customized processes share many commonalities and some