SWB process: A business process management system driven by semantic technologies

Constant changes in the market force enterprises to continuously define and redefine their business processes, and the technology that supports them, in order to fulfill the organizational objectives. Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) are intensively used in organizations as a useful tool to face those changes. However, as stated in literature and practice, a BPMS still has to cope with the agility to adapt to changes and the low degree of automation of the BPM life-cycle. These issues have been faced through the integration of BPM with Semantic Technologies. Some proposals are focused in conceptual approaches while others involve tools to cover part of the BPM life-cycle. Nevertheless, there are no works that have implemented a BPMS that exploits Semantic Technologies for covering the whole BPM life-cycle. In this paper we present SWB Process, an industrial and Open Source BPMS completely driven by Semantic Technologies that uses ontologies to agilely support constant changes in the processes of organizations, increasing the degree of automation of the BPM life-cycle. Moreover, we take advantage of ontologies to quickly adapt it to new BPM needs. SWB Process has been validated through real projects in several government agencies in Mexico.