A Core Ontology of Business Processes Based on DOLCE

New performance requirements to adapt to the changing environment and to maintain a competitive advantage have contributed since the 1980s to the emergence of new types of organizations focused on projects or processes. To facilitate the implementation of this process view of organizations, many theoreticians and practitioners have proposed analysis and modeling frameworks, ontologies being considered as a relevant tool to conduct a “semantic analysis” of business processes. Approaches in this area are, however, based on ad hoc, often implicit modeling principles and the proposed ontologies remain poor in terms of expressiveness. The objective of this paper is to analyze the ontological foundations of the business processes following a formal approach. We propose a core ontology of business processes specializing the DOLCE foundational ontology and supplementing Bottazzi and Ferrario’s DOLCE-based formal ontology of organizations. This ontology comprises several modules to reflect both the “static” aspects of organizations and their behaviors, including intentional ones. In the article, we present the contents of the ontology, the formal ontological tools reused for its design, and the various theories the ontology is committed to.