Business process management software tools

In line with increasing attention to the scope of Business Process Management (BPM) over the past two decades, many techniques and tools have been introduced. Finding the proper technique and tool in each phase of the business process management life cycle takes time and effort. This study aims to design and develop an ontology to facilitate the selection of suitable techniques and tools at each step of the BPM life cycle. This ontology provides a common understanding of concepts of this domain for computers. The study results showed that two taxonomies for techniques and software tools for business process management were created based on BPM life cycle steps. Then, an ontology was developed for them. Noy & McGuinness methodology was applied to implement this ontology, and Protégé 5.2 and owl language were used. Also, the quality criteria-based approach was used for the evaluation of ontology. All the main concepts in the domain of BPM techniques and tools were extracted from previous studies. There are 298 terms. 58 of them are domain concepts or classes, 2 are about taxonomic relations, 2 are related to data property, and 224 are instances. This research used these terms, and the deployed ontology with the quality criteria-based approach was evaluated.