AN UPPER ONTOLOGY FOR ENTERPRISE PROCESS

MODELLING

Aikaterini-Maria Sourouni, George Kourlimpinis, John Psarras and Dimitris Askounis

National Technical University of Athens, Iroon Polytexneiou 9, Zografou 157 73, Athens, Greece

Keywords: Ontology, Enterprise Modelling, Process model.

Abstract: During last decades great expectations have been placed on Enterprise Modelling and Integration through

ontologies. However, most of the existing proposals concentrate on an extensive set of enterprise concepts

and definitions, making difficult for ontology engineers to distinguish only those of their interest. In this

regard, this paper presents an approach towards a standard abstract framework for constructing Enterprise

ontologies. The main aim of this approach is constructing an upper-level Ontology incorporating generic

enterprise concepts and relations. The proposed ontology aims at becoming a starting point rather than being

a predefined solution. Starting with this upper Ontology, business analysts can adapt and enhance in order to

model enterprises of any type and sector.

1 INTRODUCTION

Enterprises in order to survive under the new

competitive circumstances need to comprise

flexible, interoperable structures, which provide

coordination among their processes and facilitate the

capitalization and reusability of enterprise

knowledge.

Ontologies have promoted an innovative and

lucrative approach to Enterprise Modelling. Their

expressiveness in combination with their clarity and

expansiveness, have resolved important problems,

not resolved by classic modelling methods. (Gruber,

1991) However, most of the existing ontology-based

frameworks concentrate and promote such an

extensive set of enterprise concepts and definitions

that it may be difficult for ontology engineers to

distinguish and exploit only those of their interest.

Ontologies can be used to support human or

automated reasoning, they are a means of

communication among people with diverse

backgrounds, they offer a tool for efficient

computation, they always offer a medium of human

expression and they are easy to augment, extend and

refine (Brewster and O’Hara, 2007)

Enterprise knowledge requires systematic modelling

and integration in an effective and cohesive way. In

this direction, this paper presents an approach, which

aims mainly at the construction of an Upper

Ontology for process flow modelling incorporating

generic enterprise concepts and relations. This

ontology does not pretend to provide a predefined

solution but rather a starting point which can lead

the ontology developer to adapt and enhance it for

Process Modelling of any kind of enterprise. As

expressed by (Poli, 1996) “An ontology is not a

catalogue of the world, a taxonomy, a terminology

or a list of objects, things or whatever else. If

anything, an ontology is the general framework (i.e.

structure) within which catalogues, taxonomies,

terminologies may be given suitable organization.”

During last decades “Ontologies” have entered

the Computer Science Community. Ontologies

represent a new technology direction towards the

improvement of information systems and

management. In particular, this paper focuses on the

significant role of ontologies in business modelling,

enterprise knowledge and information management.

A standard ontology - based enterprise

modelling approach consists of three abstraction

layers (INTEROP, 2004):

 The Upper Business Ontology layer comprises

the generic meta-modelling concepts,

 The Application Ontology layer implements

needed specialization of the upper entities and

concepts in the application field, and

 The Lower Business Ontology layer

implements specified instances – objects.

Regarding the structure of this paper, Section 2

presents the main work described in this paper,

328

Sourouni A., Kourlimpinis G., Psarras J. and Askounis D. (2009).

AN UPPER ONTOLOGY FOR ENTERPRISE PROCESS MODELLING.

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing, pages 328-331

DOI: 10.5220/0002329803280331

 SciTePress

analyzes the organization, the design and the

refinement of the suggested upper ontology; Finally

Section 3 concludes.

2 THE PROPOSED UPPER

ENTERPRISE ONTOLOGY

The goal of this section is to present the proposed

approach, which pushes previous work in this

domain one step further. The classic process

modelling methodologies have adopted a workflow-

minded approach, especially because of Enterprise

Modelling Languages and Tools focus on control

flow patterns. Only recently the weaknesses of a

merely workflow-centric representation were

pointed out by (van der Aalst and Pesic, 2006).

Workflow-centric process representations are not

very suitable for reaching the underlying knowledge

level of business processes. The approach of the

Upper Enterprise Ontology has been basically

inspired from the Edinburgh Enterprise Ontology

and other research projects and initiatives (e.g.

Toronto Virtual Enterprise, TOVE Project).

Nevertheless, the ontological approaches of these

projects have not created models, which can be

supported by current (workflow-centric) BPM tools

and infrastructure (Hepp and Roman, 2007). The

proposed approach aims at integrating a

comprehensive conceptual metamodel of an

enterprise in the actual executable workflows.

2.1 Organization

A prototype ontology has been initially elaborated,

integrating, additionally, the main object-oriented

principles (Ecker, Preis and Schneider, 1996):

 Class – defines the abstract characteristics of an

entity including the entity’s attributes

(properties) and things that can or cannot do

(methods, features).

 Instance – defines a particular instance of a

class with concrete values of the class’s

characteristics.

 Inheritance – allows the hierarchy of classes.

There can be a parent class and a lot of sub-

classes to access the properties and features of

their parent.

 Association – defines the relations between

instances of classes (entities).

 Modularity – is a concept associated with the

complexity of a model. Every complex model

must be decomposed to simple, independent

modules, which all together construct a more

complicated.

2.2 Design

Core terms, concepts and their relationships are the

most important components of an Enterprise

Ontology.

Designing the suggested Upper Enterprise

Ontology, six main domains of enterprise concepts

have been identified. These meta-concepts can be

utterly enhanced and used to incorporate the

enterprise information and knowledge:Actor – refers

to the active parts of enterprise. Actors can not only

represent people involved actively in a business

operation, but also they can be groups of people,

such as internal departments of the organization or

even external parties, for example other enterprises,

government, institutions etc. In general, it concerns

these entities, which interact actively within the

enterprise processes in- or externally supplying a

stimulus to the enterprise processing whether it is

producing an event or performing an activity. Actors

should, indeed, be categorized according to their

roles, rights and tasks.

Business Object – refers to passive structures and

objects of the enterprise, involved in enterprise

activities and actions, i.e. resources, inputs, outputs,

assistant material etc. They are usually entities that

are accessed, used, transformed or generated from

enterprise activities, or help, facilitate processes.

Process – refers to all the business operations,

actions and activities inside the enterprise or with

external parties. Within a process, Actors and

Objects are involved. A Process, as a rule, needs

someone to activate it, manage it or supervise it,

inputs or resources to use but also usually produces

outputs. However, there are also activities and

processes triggered to start or end by a business

event.

Event – represents actions and situations which

can trigger, transform or terminate a Process. Events

are generated and processed by Actors. Events are

actions, which play important role at the beginning,

at the end or even during enterprise processing.

Transition – meant to represent occasions in

which the process flow tends to convergence or

divergence. It is about entities that assist the parallel

flow of sub-processes or represent the decision,

among more than one process flow.

Connection – refers to the connections between

the instances of the other ontology’s classes

represented in a business process model. It is

decided that the object-oriented principle of

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“association” should be incorporated to the

Ontology as a separate class because of the

significant information repository obtained. The

main necessary properties of the Connection class

are the connected entities and the orientation of the

Connection. The Connection in a process flow can

mean the correlation between relevant concepts or

denote the sequence of a process flow.

The above mentioned entities have been

identified as the meta – classes, which are

indispensable in a business modelling framework.

They have generic characteristics, attributes and

features, which need to be moreover specialized so

as to suit any type and kind of organization. Some of

these attributes are represented below, in Table 1.

Apparently, in different enterprise sectors or in

different countries etc., to these generic

characteristics others should be possibly added or

these may be changed and adapted to the current

conditions.

Table 1: Upper Classes’ Attributes.

Actors

o Capabilities

o Role

o Secondary Authorities

Business Objects

o Type (e.g. In/Output, assistant

medium)

Processes

o Goal

o Duration

o Priority

Events

o Goal

o Method

o Frequency

Moreover, the suggested Ontology incorporates

conceptual relations - norms in the meaning of

conventions and conditions adopted, as mentioned

below, offering a set of tools and guidelines in order

to use the ontology:

Inheritance – instantiation. The six classes,

“Actor”, “Business Object”, “Process”, “Event”,

“Transition” and “Connection” can be ancestors of

new sub-classes, generated from the nature and the

type of an enterprise or the complexity of the

required business models. These classes but also the

sub-classes, which inherit from them, can be

instantiated in the same or different business models.

Association. Designing a business model,

associating entities plays a significant role. There

must be several axioms controlling the properties of

the “Connection” Class and the constraints that this

class should follow. Instances of the classes “Actor”,

Business Object”, “Process”, “Event” and

“Transition” should be able to get associated or

connected through a “Connection”. For example, in

the sales-model an “Accountant” -as Actor- should

be the one that “Makes out” -as Process- the

“Invoice” -as Business Object-. So, these three

instances “Accountant”, “Makes out”, “Invoice”

need to be connected. In the scope of the

“association” meta-relation, there are constraints and

rules about the potential connections. For instance,

there is no meaning for two instances of the class

“Business Object” to be connected to each other.

Modularity. Business processes are often

complex, which make difficult their models design

and representation. For this reason, modularity of

business models is essential for ontology engineers

and users. The Suggested Upper Enterprise

Ontology integrates modularity and decomposition

of Processes, thus the sub-processes can be

represented as “black boxes” simplifying the design

of more sophisticated processes. For example, in the

Buying-model should exist a process of “Arrange

Payment”. This process can be represented in

another process model in details. In this way, there

can be a general business model, for example

Buying-model, which comprises all the necessary

sub-processes as activities in it; however, anyone

can gather details in specified models of every

activity of them, represented as a distinct process.

In the following figure (Figure 1) the potential

anatomy of an enhanced version of the suggested

Upper Enterprise Ontology is represented.

Figure 1: Upper Enterprise Ontology’s essential and

enhanced layers.

2.3 Refinement

In order to make the potential use of the Suggested

Ontology explicit an example of enhancing the

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ontological class hierarchy is presented hereafter.

This enhanced Ontology will be able to represent

several processes of a small or medium- sized

enterprise through properly defined and

comprehensive business models. This refinement is

represented in Figure 2.

The six generic classes are refined to more

specialized classes and this refinement continues to

lower levels, for example the class of “Order

Cancellation” is a refinement and inherits from the

class “Ending Event” and the last is a sub-class of

the meta - class “Event”.

The definition and explanation of all these sub-

classes is beyond the purpose of the proposed

ontology because this would lead towards an

undesired direction, i.e. a large ontology with an

extensive and complex set of terms and definitions.

The main objective of the presented approach is to

define explicitly generic concepts and the

relationships between them.

Figure 2: A refined version of Upper Enterprise Ontology.

3 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper a methodological approach towards the

construction of a generic upper-level Ontology has

been sought. The Ontology will be able to be used as

an initial modelling set of entities for modelling

different types of Enterprise Ontologies. The

proposed ontology can be enhanced, refined and

used in different sectors and enterprise

environments.

It can be used by already existing enterprise

modelling methods and environments. More

specifically, a business-model description language

can make use the Suggested Ontology as a medium

to generate and represent formal business models.

Furthermore, a business modelling software tool,

based on the suggested Upper Enterprise Ontology,

could lead enterprises to design, present, compare

and improve their business models in a simplistic

and comprehensive way and through these models to

monitor and revise their processes and their strategy.

Accordingly, the second step of work is to refine and

improve the Upper Ontology, in order to be used by

a new-developed software tool, which will support

Application and Lower Business Ontologies

construction, models designing, and semantic

reasoning based on the predefined meta-concepts

and principles of the Suggested Ontology.

Therefore, working in the direction of implementing

such a software application, which will be presented

next, has already started.

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