Semantic Representation and Rule Based Patterns Discovery and Verification in eProcurement Business Processes for eGovernment

Italian Public Administrations are adopting formalisms to describe their internal Business workflows, so that public processes become validable according to current legislation, and shareable among different offices. One of the most recurring Business Cases in Public Administration is represented by e-Procurement, that is the purchase of assets, through Public funds and supported by digital instruments, of material resources to be used within the administration. Validating e-Procurement workflows, formalized through BPMN, is an important step to augment the Public Admnistration transparency and to verify the respect of current laws, especially in consideration of possible evolutions and changes in available technologies and legislation. In this paper an e-Procurement BPMN, focused on the procedures related to “Framework agreement” (“Accordo Quadro”), has been taken in consideration, and semantic technologies have been applied to annotate it and test its validity against an existing knowledge base. Semantic annotation has been carried out through an already existing tool, which has been exploited to identify the main element of the BPMN. Annotations of BPM have been carried out against the PublicContract ontology produced by OntoPia. The Linked Open Data offered by Regione Campania have been used to test and verify the BPMN, and a set of Prolog rule has been applied to the semantically annotated BPMN in order to further evaluate the performances of the Process.