Exploring proposed ontological issues of ARIS with different categories of modellers

Many organisations in Australia and world-wide are adopting the practice of business process modelling for reasons such as Business Process Management (BPM) and new legislation requirements. As these modelling tasks are often time consuming and expensive, it is important that the tools and techniques that are used can effectively capture the real world systems being modelled. Numerous studies have been conducted to evaluate the ontological goodness of a range of modelling techniques. However, most of these studies have focussed on the ontological analysis, rather than the exploration and empirical testing of the derived propositions. This paper explores the actual relevance of proposed ontological issues of the process modelling technique within ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems). Besides a deeper understanding for the identified ontological issues, we also gained insights into how to further proceed with a meta-model approach to ontologically evaluate process modelling techniques. Based on our findings, we propose a more structured approach for the empirical investigation of ontological analyses. This approach extends the current body of knowledge in this area and will provide valuable guidance for related work.