BPAL : Public Web Home

BPAL stands for Business Process Abstract Language.
It is a Business Process (BP) modelling and reasoning environment where the procedural knowledge of a BP can be enriched through ontology-based annotations. 

The BPAL Platform provides a graphical user interface to ease the definition of a Business Process Knowledge Base that collects the various facets of process knowledge. It also provides a reasoner implementing services for the enactment, verification, retrieval, and composition of processes in the knowledge base.

Presentations

• BPAL: A Platform for Managing Business Process Knowledge Bases via Logic Programming

Publications

• Fabrizio Smith, Maurizio Proietti:
  Rule-based Behavioral Reasoning on Semantic Business Processes. In Proceedings ICAART 2013, Vol. 2, pp. 130-143, SciTePress (2013).
• Fabrizio Smith, Maurizio Proietti:
  Ontology-based Representation and Reasoning on Process Models: A Logic Programming Approach. CoRR abs/1410.1776 (2014)
• Fabrizio Smith, Maurizio Proietti:
  BPAL: A tool for managing semantically enriched conceptual process models. In Proceedings of eChallenges e-2014 (2014)

Other Media

Contributors

• Fabrizio Smith
• Dario De Sanctis
• Maurizio Proietti

Download

• Download BPAL binaries here
• Download BPAL sources here

User's Guide

Running BPAL
Required: Windows OS, Java 6

1. Run SemBPPlatform\eclipse.exe

2. Select a workspace
e.g.    C:\Users\maurizio\Desktop\BPAL\SemBPPlatform\workspace
 
Handling BPAL Projects
BPAL projects appear in the Navigator panel

To create a new project:
File->New->Other->SemBPProject->CreateSemBPProject

A project contains the following folders:
- BPMNRepository, contains the BPMN diagram (.bpmn_diagram file), its XML serialization (.bpmn file), and the serialization of the user's semantic annotations (.ser file)
- OntologyRepository, contains the ontologies (.owl files) to be used for semantic annotation;
- SemanticBPRepository, contains the OWL export (.owl files) of the BP

Process Modeling
Processes can be modeled by using the BPMN Graphical Editor and saved in the BPMNRepository.

Importing and Visualizing Ontologies
To open the OWLOntology panel:
BPAL->Show OWLOntology

The user can load the ontologies available in the project by using the "+" button in the OWLOntology panel. Also new OWL ontologies can be imported via the "+" button. Ontologies can then be visualized in the panel.

Semantic Annotation
A "Properties" panel associated with a process element can be open by right-clicking on the element (Annotation->Show Properties View). The Terminological Annotation, the Condition and the Effects (Eff+, Eff-) can be specified by using the given buttons and text windows. The user can save the annotations through the "Save Annotation" button.

Namespace
Namespaces can be handled via the BPAL->ShowNameSpace.
A Key can be associated with a namespace identifier (URI).

Querying
Before querying the BP knowledge base the user must compile the project by using: BPAL->Consult WorkSpaceQueries can be issued from the QuBPAL panel, which can be opened by BPAL->Show QuBPAL. Queries have the syntax
    SELECT ?x* WHERE predicate

Exporting OWL
Semantically annotated BPs can be exported to OWL files by using BPAL->Export OWL. Processes and annotations are serialized and saved to the “OntologyRepository” folder of the project.