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Information Retrieval (IR) System (Naouar et al., 2017a; Naouar et al., 2017b) is a set of resources and tools that allow users to search for information in a given domain. These systems permit users to accomplish their research according to their objectives. In this sense, processes provided by the IR systems allow users often to determine their own procedure. In such context, the user's manner to perform a task (purchasing a product from an e-commerce website, searching for a document in a digital library, etc.) represents a “self-defined process” (Luengo & Sepúlveda, 2011). Among these systems that produce the self-defined BP type, there is the case of digital libraries (Shiri, 2018), e-commerce websites (Laudon & Traver, 2016), cyber-physical systems (Seiger et al., 2019), Electronic administration services (Kasprzyk, 2018), and others.
Self-defined BPs are considered as a special category of BPs, with high variability level (Cole, 2015; Dinh & Tamine, 2015). This category of BPs represents user’s behaviors that may achieve one objective in diverse ways to perform a research. Indeed, users in information-seeking situations adopt behaviors that depend on many factors (Naouar et al., 2017b; Ruso et al., 2013; Laudon et al., 2016), that can change user’s processes. These factors are: 1. User’s objective. 2. User’s Requirement and 3. Engine’s Knowledge used to search the information.
Therefore, the difficulty of representing self-defined BP emerges from its variability (Athukorala et al., 2015; Luengo & Sepúlveda, 2011). The later changes according to different contexts and requirement. Even though managing process variability is a non-trivial task because it requires specific standards, methods, and technologies, it still involves many parameters that are not always formally defined. For example, designing the reference process model, which represent the commonalities from the process family, is a challenge, as well as the necessary adjustments to configure a specific process variant.
To overcome these challenges, it would be useful to represent users’ behavior (information-seeking processes), i.e., to define the generic process model, in order to study the self-defined BP variability and recommend the suitable path to each user. Also, it is useful to manage the process variants through ontologies based on semantic reasoning and Configurable Process Model (CPM) (Gottschalk et al., 2007), i.e., to select the appropriate process variant according to the combination between different self-defined BP ontologies.