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A methodology for discovering business processes in different semantic levels

e-Transformation of an enterprise requires the collaboration of business processes to be suited to the business participants' purpose. To realize this collaboration, business processes should be implemented as components and the system developers could be able to reuse the components for their specific purpose. The first step of this collaboration is the discovery of exact components for business processes. A dilemma, however, is the fact that there are thousands or even millions of business processes which vary from one enterprise to another. Moreover, business processes could be decomposed into multiple levels of semantics and classified into several process areas. In general, discovery of exact business processes requires understanding of widely adopted classification schemes such as CBPC, OAGIS, or SCOR. To cope with this obstacle, business process metadata should be defined and managed regardless of specific classification schemes to support effective discovery and reuse of business processes components. In this paper, a methodology to discover business process components published in different semantic levels is proposed. The proposed methodology represents the metadata of business process components as topic maps stored in a registry and utilizes the powerful features of topic maps for process discovery. TM4J, an open-source topic map engine, is modified to support concept matching and navigation. With the implemented tool, application system developers can discover and publish the business process components effectively.