Ontology-Based Business Process Modeling: A Review

Business Process Modeling (BPM) has been receiving attention in recent years. Organizations operating in distributed, data, and knowledge-intensive environments need precise machine-interpretable process descriptions. Traditional business process modeling notations such as BPMN, UML Activity Diagrams, and EPCs are highly effective for visualizing workflows and supporting communication among stakeholders but do not address problems such as semantic ambiguity, inconsistent terminology, limited reuse, and poor interoperability across organizational boundaries. Since ontology-based models can enable seamless process integration, coordination, and collaboration among autonomous systems. Therefore, ontology-based descriptions are well-suited for complex enterprise systems and supply chains. Ontology-based business process modeling techniques provide a robust and theoretically grounded solution by introducing explicit semantics, formal reasoning capabilities, and shared conceptual frameworks into business process models. This semantic enrichment significantly enhances the expressive power of business process descriptions while preserving compatibility with existing modeling standards. However, ontology-based business process modeling also has its own challenges. The development and maintenance of high-quality ontologies require significant effort and domain expertise. Moreover, reasoning over large-scale ontologies may introduce computational overhead, particularly in real-time environments. Tool support is another practical concern, as seamless integration between business process modeling tools and ontology management platforms is still limited in many industrial settings. The primary objective of this study is to conduct a systematic literature review of ontology-based business process modeling approaches to provide research recommendations based on their strengths and limitations. The results indicate that there are several research gaps that should be addressed to ensure smooth process integration across organizational boundaries. Additionally, empirical validation of ontology-based BPM frameworks in real-time environments is limited. The proposed framework not capable enough to update ontologies with the evolution of the business and related processes. In this regard, an Input Process Output (IPO) BPM Framework to integrate ontologies into BPM as a three-stage transformation mechanism is proposed.

@article{Thai2026,
  title     = {Ontology-Based Business Process Modeling: A Review},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {17},
  number    = {6},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Low Kok Thai and Furkh Zeshan and Nazri Kama and Riza Sulaiman and Mohammad Nazir Ahmad and Uwais Qidwai},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170669},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170669}
}