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This article proposes defining semantics for Business Process Management systems interoperability through the ontology of Electronic Business Documents (EBD) used to interchange the information required to perform cross-organizational processes. The semantic model generated allows aligning enterprise's business processes to support cross-organizational processes by matching the business ontology of each business partner with the EBD ontology. The result is a flexible software architecture that allows dynamically defining cross-organizational business processes by reusing the EBD ontology.For developing the semantic model, a method is presented, which is based on a strategy for discovering entity features whose interpretation depends on the context, and representing them for enriching the ontology. The proposed method complements ontology learning techniques that can not infer semantic features not represented in data sources. In order to improve the representation of these entity features, the method proposes using widely accepted ontologies, for representing time entities and relations, physical quantities, measurement units, official country names, and currencies and funds, among others. When the ontologies reuse is not possible, the method proposes identifying whether that feature is simple or complex, and defines a strategy to be followed. An empirical validation of the approach has been performed through a case study.

In order to support the execution of collaborative business processes, trading partners have to exchange electronic business documents. Since each partner has its own systems and culture, they could use different terms and metadata structures to represent their data, even when referring to the same domain of interest. Then, an appropriate approach for defining the semantics of these documents is required to achieve semantic interoperability. To this aim, a number of approaches have been proposed based on the use of a single domain ontology. These approaches imply the imposition of a global meaning of terms, which are used to represent the entities of a domain. This goes in opposition to one of the aims of trading partners, which is to participate in collaborative business processes without losing their autonomy and privacy. In this scenario, it is necessary to define a framework for allowing trading partners to exchange information without imposing a global meaning of it. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed in order to define the semantics of the electronic business documents interchanged between trading partners in a collaborative relationship. This approach is based on the idea of making some domain features, which are generally implicit, explicit in the domain ontologies. An application example of this approach is also presented.

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