Creating and Updating Personalized and Verbalized Business Process Descriptions

The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAISs) has resulted in large process model collections. To support users having different perspectives on complex processes and related data, a PAIS should enable personalized process views, i.e., user-specific abstractions of process models. Despite the abstraction achieved through views of the graphical process models, many end users still struggle with understanding these graphical models and their details. For selected user
groups, therefore, a PAIS should provide verbalized process descriptions describing their role in the process. Existing PAISs neither provide mechanisms for managing process views nor verbalized process descriptions. While process views have been used as visual abstractions for large process models, so far no work exists on how to provide both personalized and verbalized process descriptions based on respective views. This paper presents an approach for creating such personalized and verbalized process descriptions based on process views. Furthermore, textual changes of a personalized and verbalized process description are correctly mapped to corresponding updates of the underlying process model. In this context, all other views and process descriptions related to this process model are migrated to the new version of the process model as well. Overall, our approach enables end users to understand and evolve large process models based on personalized and verbalized process descriptions.