A Cooperative Approach for Knowledge-based Business Process Design in a Public Authority

2025-07-26

AI Summary

To address the practical challenge faced by small- and medium-sized organizations—namely, business domain experts’ limited knowledge engineering capabilities and consequent difficulty in autonomously constructing process models—this paper proposes a knowledge-based collaborative process design method. Starting from unstructured textual knowledge, the method employs a stepwise guided mechanism and graphical modeling techniques to progressively transform text into structured knowledge and then into formal process models, enabling business experts to build visual workflows without specialized expertise. Its key innovations lie in a low-threshold, collaborative, and knowledge-driven process modeling paradigm, which significantly improves modeling efficiency and cross-role collaboration. Empirical validation in public-sector settings confirms the method’s feasibility and practicality, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing small- and medium-sized organizations’ adaptive capacity for process digitization.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Web
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge Engineering
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods, algorithms and applications for the development of semantic models, knowledge graphs and other forms of structured data models with machine-interpretable semantics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Personalized content ranking and presentation

Abstract

Enterprises are currently undergoing profound transformations due to the unpostponable digital transformation. Then, to remain competitive, enterprises must adapt their organisational structures and operations. This organisational shift is also important for small and medium-sized enterprises. A key innovation frontier is the adoption of process-oriented production models. This paper presents a knowledge-based method to support business experts in designing business processes. The method requires no prior expertise in Knowledge Engineering and guides designers through a structured sequence of steps to produce a diagrammatic workflow of the target process. The construction of the knowledge base starts from simple, text-based, knowledge artefacts and then progresses towards more structured, formal representations. The approach has been conceived to allow a shared approach for all stakeholders and actors who participate in the BP design.

Problem

• Develops a knowledge-based method for business process design
• Supports non-experts in creating diagrammatic workflows
• Enables shared stakeholder collaboration in process design

Innovation

• Knowledge-based method for business process design
• No prior Knowledge Engineering expertise required
• Shared approach for all stakeholders