Enterprise-Specific Ontology-Driven Process Modelling

Abstract

Abstract. Different process models are created within an enterprise by different modelers who use different enterprise terms. This hinders model interoperability and integration. A possible solution is formalizing the vocabulary used within the enterprise in an ontology and put this ontology as bases for constructing process models. Given that an enterprise is an evolving entity, the ontology needs to evolve to properly reflect the domain of the enterprise. This paper proposes an enterprise-specific ontology-driven process modelling method which tackles the two aforementioned issues by assisting the modeller in creating process models using terminology from the ontology and simultaneously supporting ontology enrichment with feedback from those models. When the modeller creates a model, matching mechanisms incorporated in the method are working together to suggest a list of ontological concepts that have a high potential to be useful for a particular modelling element. When the model is created, its quality is first evaluated from different perspectives to make sure that it can be used within the enterprise, and second to discover whether its feedback can be useful for the ontology. When the feedback is extracted, the proposed method incorporates guidelines on how to use this feedback.

Process ontology development using natural language processing: a multiple case study

“…In the literature, studies related to process ontologies has addressed the problem using two different approaches. The first approach consists of methods to integrate domain ontologies with process models to build process ontologies (Alkhaldi et al, 2015;Bulegon Gassen et al, 2017;Cherfi et al, 2013;Dimitrov et al, 2007;Fan et al, 2016;Francescomarino et al, 2014;Thomas and Fellmann, 2009). Although these approaches improve efficiency, the formal representation of processes is limited to the knowledge that already exists in domain ontologies.…”

“…In the manner of using ontologies for process modeling, the works by Alkhaldi, Fan, Bulegon and Francescomarino (Alkhaldi et al, 2015;Bulegon Gassen et al, 2017;Fan et al, 2016;Francescomarino et al, 2014) are the most related studies to the approach we propose. They have validated the improvement in the quality of process models using domain ontology (Fan et al, 2016), semantic consistency using enterprise ontology (Alkhaldi et al, 2015) and semantic annotation (Francescomarino et al, 2014). Francescomarino et al (2014) use semantic annotations for collaborative process modeling in BPMN.…”

“…There is an agreement in the proposed and existing research, on preventing conflicts using semantic annotations in process modeling. Similar to Francescomarino's study, Alkhaldi et al (2015) use the enterprise ontology for creating consistent process models in BPMN notation. However, they do not propose a transformation approach.…”

“…Therefore, domain ontologies do not necessarily contain information regarding the process entities of the organization. Several methods have been proposed for integrating domain ontologies with process models to build process ontologies (Alkhaldi et al, 2015;Cherfi et al, 2013;Dimitrov et al, 2007;Fan et al, 2016;Francescomarino et al, 2014;Thomas and Fellmann, 2009). While these approaches proved to be useful, they have an inherent limitation; the formal representation of resulting processes is limited to the knowledge that exists in the underlying domain ontologies.…”