- Conference Article
- 10.1145/3731443.3771361
sBPMN: A Framework for Capturing Business Process Semantics in Dynamic Knowledge Graphs
- Dec 10, 2025
- Franz Krause + 3 more +3
Business process models are widely used in enterprises to orchestrate workflows involving events, tasks, and agents. BPMN provides a standardized syntax to capture structural semantics, yet domain-level semantics often remain implicit, typically expressed through descriptive annotations. Thus, integrating BPMN processes with external data is challenging, limiting semantic interoperability. Building on the principles of Linked Data, several approaches have been proposed to embed BPMN processes within ontologies and knowledge graphs to overcome this limitation. However, current approaches are restricted to abstract process models, with limited or no support for dynamic runtime executions. Therefore, we introduce semantic BPMN (sBPMN), a framework for representing BPMN process models in a modular ontology directly derived from the official BPMN 2.0 XML schema, and their execution traces in a dynamic knowledge graph. Both static and dynamic fragments can then be easily linked to external sources. We demonstrate a system architecture compatible with state-of-the-art BPMN orchestration engines, showing that sBPMN enables semantic linking of process elements and external data as well as validation of process instances against formal constraints. Finally, we showcase the applicability of sBPMN in an industrial use case, where human–AI processes are modeled via BPMN and semantically enriched with domain data to facilitate standardization and semantic downstream analysis.
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