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Process Fragmentation: An Ontological Perspective

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Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling (BPMDS 2015, EMMSAD 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 214))

Abstract

Process fragmentation provides the basis for re-usability and process improvement. Various re-searchers have already introduced different definitions for what constitutes a reasonable process fragment, and have offered algorithmic support for identifying such fragments. As we will show in this paper, some of these definitions suffer from ambiguity or imprecision. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are twofold: first, we provide an ontological assessment of the various process fragment definitions based on the well-known Bunge’s Ontology and its process representational model, GPM. On this basis, we then extract the most important features of these definitions in order to formalize a precise definition for process fragments and propose a precise and non-ambiguous definition: morphological fragmentation. We present our work through a case study and report on our observations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

    Asef Pourmasoumi & Ebrahim Bagheri

  2. Web Technology Lab, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

    Asef Pourmasoumi & Mohsen Kahani

  3. School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Surrey, Canada

    Mohsen Asadi

Authors
  1. Asef Pourmasoumi
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  2. Mohsen Kahani
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  3. Ebrahim Bagheri
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  4. Mohsen Asadi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Asef Pourmasoumi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Luxembourg Institute of Science & Technology, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Khaled Gaaloul

  2. Munich University of Applied Sciences, Munich, Germany

    Rainer Schmidt

  3. Université Paris 1 Panthéon – Sorbonne, Paris, France

    Selmin Nurcan

  4. Lusofona University, Lisbon, Portugal

    Sérgio Guerreiro

  5. Luxembourg Institute of Science & Technology, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Qin Ma

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Pourmasoumi, A., Kahani, M., Bagheri, E., Asadi, M. (2015). Process Fragmentation: An Ontological Perspective. In: Gaaloul, K., Schmidt, R., Nurcan, S., Guerreiro, S., Ma, Q. (eds) Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. BPMDS EMMSAD 2015 2015. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 214. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19237-6_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19237-6_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19236-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19237-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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