A Core Ontology of Business Processes Based on DOLCE

Abstract

New performance requirements to adapt to the changing environment and to maintain a competitive advantage have contributed since the 1980s to the emergence of new types of organizations focused on projects or processes. To facilitate the implementation of this process view of organizations, many theoreticians and practitioners have proposed analysis and modeling frameworks, ontologies being considered as a relevant tool to conduct a "semantic analysis" of business processes. Approaches in this area are, however, based on ad hoc, often implicit modeling principles and the proposed ontologies remain poor in terms of expressiveness. The objective of this paper is to analyze the ontological foundations of the business processes following a formal approach. We propose a core ontology of business processes specializing the DOLCE foundational ontology and supplementing Bottazzi and Ferrario's DOLCE-based formal ontology of organizations. This ontology comprises several modules to reflect both the "static" aspects of organizations and their behaviors, including intentional ones. In the article, we present the contents of the ontology, the formal ontolog-B Mohamed Turki ical tools reused for its design, and the various theories the ontology is committed to.

An Approach for Developing an Ontology: Learned from Business Model Ontology Design and Development

“…It focuses on the details of formalization rather than the broader process of ontology development [31]. Despite this, OntoSpec remains a valuable ODM widely used across various application domains such as neurology [32] and business process [33].…”

Conceptual analysis of sensitive business processes

“…In particular, the different knowledge identification methods centered on process analysis aim to identify, model and analyze sensitive processes, in order to identify crucial knowledge (e.g. (Grundstein, 2009;Saad et al, 2009;Turki et al, 2014Turki et al, , 2016Ghrab et al, 2017). However, the critical activity of "modeling sensitive business processes" is neither explained nor studied in depth.…”

“…The design of the COSBP ontology is based on this paradigm. The design of the artefact is mainly driven by the adaptation and the extension of adequate techniques and methods from the field of ontological engineering and the exploitation of domain core ontologies to define the concepts relating to the notion of "sensitive business process" (Masolo et al, 2003;Kassel, 2005;Fortier and Kassel, 2004;Trypuz, 2008;Bottazzi and Ferrario, 2009;Kassel, 2010;Kassel et al, 2012;Turki et al, 2016;Ghrab et al, 2017) in order to ensure relevance and rigor (Hevner and Chatterjee, 2010;Peffers et al, 2008). Note that the principle of design science (DS) is based on the engineering paradigm of developing information systems and covers solving practical and theoretical problems by creating new or innovative artefacts (Peffers et al, 2008).…”

“…These are the functional dimension, the behavioral dimension, the organizational dimension, the informational dimension, the intentional dimension and the knowledge dimension (Ben Hassen et al, 2017a, b, c, 2018. We have extended the work of the state of the art and we have improved, on the one hand, the first five dimensions of BP definition which are typically business modeling oriented (Van der Aalst et al, 2003;Saidani and Nurcan, 2009;Heidari et al, 2013;Jankovic et al, 2015;Turki et al, 2016;Ben Said et al, 2018), by proposing new characteristics and new invariant concepts of SBP. On the other hand, we have introduced the new "knowledge dimension" in order to take into account all the relevant aspects related to the KM domain.…”

Comparative Analysis of Contemporary Modeling Languages Based on BPM4KI Meta-Model for Sensitive Business Processes Representation

“…TheBusinessProcessMeta-ModelforKnowledgeIdentification(BPM4KI)(BenHassenetal., 2017a;2017b)wasdeveloped,fromanextensiveliteraturereview,toaddresstheexistinglimitations andsoimprovetherepresentationofSBPs.ItcomprisesalltheelementstomakeaSBPexplicit.This meta-modelissemanticallyrichandwell-basedoncoredomainontologies( (Kassel,2005) (Kassel et al, 2012) (Turki et al, 2016)), which are based on top of the DOLCE foundational ontology (Masoloetal.,2004).BPM4KIcomprisesconceptsfromseveralperspectives/dimensionsthatare crucial for a complete understanding, characterization and representation of a SBP, namely: the functionalperspective,theorganizationalperspective,thebehaviouralperspective,theinformational perspective,theintentionalperspectiveandtheknowledgeperspective.Furthermore,BPM4KIserves asasystematicevaluationframeworkoftheexpressivenessandsuitabilityofcurrentlywidely-used BPMformalismstoadequatelycoveralltherelevantelementsofaSBP.…”