Using Ontologies for Business Capability Modeling: Describing what Services and Processes Achieve

In current business process modelling environments, the functional perspective (also can be referred to in the literature as business capability, functionality or business function) for each process activity is limited to its label. Using labels only prevents stakeholders from easily and quickly understanding what business processes or services achieve. In this paper, we define a business capability meta-model that can be used for modelling business capabilities as entities composed of a set of actions and related properties. This meta-model is implemented as Resource Description Framework (RDF) vocabularies that help experts design their domain-specific high-level business capabilities that can be used for annotating their processes, services, applications, etc. We validate the business capability meta-model by using two evaluation methods: (1) ontological evaluation in order to make sure that there is no semantic ambiguity among its constructs; (2) interviews with domain experts to assess the ability of the model to represent real capabilities and to evaluate their point of view with respect to our approach.