The business process models are often subjected to change rapidly in order to cope with the market demands. It may be useful for companies to adapt a monitoring mechanism to achieve flexible business process models. It is also desirable to control the ripple effects of a change on whole or part of the business process and its running instances. It requires an exhaustive understanding of concerned changes and their application levels. In this article, we propose a methodology based on dependency analysis for an a priori change impact analysis in the business process models. The approach is based on the ontology definitions to describe the dependency relationships. The major objective is to obtain a knowledge base to help the designers and business experts to estimate the associated risk of intended changes and the effort required for their implementation.