The Purpose Of Ontology In Business Organizations

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

1. INTRODUCTION

Every organization, whether of the corporate group or SMEs desire to reduce the occurrence cycles latency for their desired results. In process-centric organizations, business processes grasp the essence to acquire the business goals such as process improvements and sustainability. Business process management (BPM) facilitates Business process using methodologies, techniques and software support to develop depict, analysis and management of operational process involving humans, organizations, documents and disparate sources of information. (Van der Aalst et al., 2003). In this context companies always strive to improve business processes encompassing different resources to optimize the performance. As the organization expands, the business operations progress in terms of complexities.

2. OBSTACLES IN UTILIZING THE FULL FLEDGE ADVANTAGES OF BPM:

BPM does not provide homogenous presentation at a semantic level of company’s process scope, which would provide accessibility to inventive queries and inspection for compliance (Hepp & Roman, 2007). Considering larger organizations that have complicated and tightly coupled business processes, it is essential to obtain in depth analysis what strategic management comprehend about considering BPM a key parameter to drive through business objectives. According to (Tian & Quan,2008), the theory of BPM is not mature yet, so there exist minimal possibility to improve the business processes once completed and deployed in the system and informal evidences recommend more expeditious approach towards BPM. Recent study reveal of 348 organizations in which 58% of organizations spent US$ 5 Million. Roughly 34% of the organizations spent US$ 4 Million to 5 Million, with 53% of organizations declared that their BPM initiatives would increase in 2006, statistics in (The state of Business process Management, 2006) mentioned in (Recker & Indulska, 2007). There is a semantic gap between the business world and IT world which use different vocabularies to designate the models and have diverse requirements on the abstraction level. The inner semantics of activities and their effects cannot be characterized in current BPM methodologies, which sorts it rigid to investigate and recognize business process behaviour and the effects on process states (Paschke, 2011). The current BPM systems still suffer from many inadequacies. They do not comprehend semantic representations of the organization’s structure and processes, and a there is still inept communication between IT components and problems (Rivera et al., 2008).

3. CONCEPT OF ONTOLOGY:

An "Ontology" explain the common terms, concepts and affiliation between concepts used to describe knowledge extent. An unequivocal depiction of a domain consists concepts, properties of concepts and relationship between them. An ontology encompasses concepts, properties, values and axioms of a domain and when instantiated Ontology transformed to Knowledge base which incorporates Ontology schema and Instantiation of it.

3.1. THE PURPOSE OF ONTOLOGY IN BUSINESS ORGANIZATIONS:

Business organizations need dexterity and expertise now a day to cope with highly influential environment, supporting ever-changing services and products and interacting with customers and partners. Companies who have merged need to scrutinize the processes of business operations to determine which are best to opt. At this instance organizations need business processes to be modelled at the semantic level, somehow the association of semantics in terms of enhancement to conventional business process modelling techniques and methodologies. Ontology facilitates with unified and common understanding of a domain, mainly focus on inferential and knowledge discovery.

4. IMPACT OF ONTOLOGY ON MODELLING AND EXECUTION OF BUSINESS PROCESSES:

The most widely used Business process modelling methods are Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Business process modelling notation (BPMN). Semantically empowering all BPM artifacts from high level design to deployment and all the runtime model of BPM application, endorses incessant process refinement, ample impact exploration and reuse to diminish process and service proliferation. A semantically enabled BPM ontology and model facilitates machine driven inference to discern implicit relationships in the models, and execute pattern-matching queries for association (Prater et al, 2012).

4.1. INFLUENCE OF ONTOLOGY ON BUSINESS PROCESS MODELLING NOTATION (BPMN):

BPMN provides the description of the chronological steps in business process workflow, additionally in diversity to business roles and organizations, allied data object and communication flows. Diagrammatic representation for BPMN consists flowcharting techniques customized for business processes. As the leading phase of Semantic Business process management, referring to BPMN, the non-formalized information entity should be transformed, to Ontology-based Information entity generating semantic annotation of information flow.

4.1.1. SEMANTICS EXTENSION OF INFORMATION ENTITIES IN BPMN:

The deployment of corporate or domain ontology concept to explain information stream on a non-technical conceptual level for business process experts. Formal domain information models are origination for semantic mediation between assorted conceptualization used by different organizations or domain (Paschke, 2011).

Diagram illustrating semantic association to information entity (Paschke, 2011:p.6)

In semantic variant of BPMN, tagging of a Business Process Diagram (BPD) objects, extracting concept descriptions from a (set of) domain ontology.

4.1.2. EXPLOITING BPMN ONTOLOGY:

The main advantage is to execute reasoning service over an instantiated BPMN ontology, by encoding a BPMN diagram as a set of instances of the BPMN and multiple reasoning services can be implemented.

1) Querying through SPARQL query mechanism exploit via reasoning the formalized information in BPMN ontology.

2) Compliance checking of a BPMN diagram against the BPMN specification, by endorsing the compliance of a process by structural conditions enforced by BPMN on diagrams.

4.1.3. LIMITATIONS OF ONTOLOGY ON BPMN:

There are restrictions in execution level properties of BPMN ontology. These properties identify behavioural nature of graphical elements in a BPMN Diagram, describing the exclusive nature for Gateway’s behaviour for diverging sequence flow.

If there is various outgoing sequence flow, then only one Gateway (or Default) Gateway shall be designated during performance of the process.

Ontologies are not appropriate particularly to model the dynamic behaviour of business process. There are other acceptable formalism methods for this purpose.

Attributes default value is another limitation of BPMN ontology. The value reserved by default attributes when they are not explicitly assigned in the process models. OWL does not support the specification of properties default value (Attributes are formalized as properties in BPMN ontology).

The "Undecidable" condition caused due to DL expressiveness and due to the fact for enduring in decidable fragment of OWL. There is a limited number of conditions that are not characterized (Rospocher et al., 2012).

4.2. INFLUENCE OF ONTOLOGY ON EXECUTION OF BUSINESS PROCESS:

WS-BPEL (Business process Execution Language for Web services) is the de Facto standard for relating Web Service flows in a workflow corresponding method by merging activities that signify interactions with Web Services (J Nitzsche et al, 2007). BPEL is the basis of process execution and denotes the IT vision on processes in Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM), which targets at spanning the gap between IT and Business views. Ontology of BPEL process simplifies reasoning about executable process models.

The relation of concept of a service invocation to a concept that signifies the determination of the invocation is attained through semantic annotation of BPEL activities.

Figure displaying Rules based BPEL in conjunction with Semantic BPEL (Paschke, 2011)

4.2.1. BUSINESS PROCESS AND SERVICE EXECUTION:

The business process interactions are identified with BPEL. It states a symbolization for postulating business process behaviour constructed on web services (Rivera et al., 2008). It can be explained in two ways.

Executable business process model definite behaviour of a contributor in a business interaction.

Business procedures, in disparity, use process descriptions that specify communally observable message interchange behaviour of each of the parties involved in protocols, without revealing their inner behaviour. The process descriptions for business protocols are called abstract processes.

5. BENEFITS FOR SEMANTIC BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT (SBPM) AT INTER-ORGANIZATION LEVEL:

Semantic web and Sematic Web Service provide suitable all-encompassing, standardize knowledge representation methods, as a consequence we recommended merging to technologies and yield one amalgamated technology called Semantic Business Process Management (Hepp et al., 2005). Semantic web services make use of semantic web technology to provision automated discovery, substitution, configuration and execution of software components called Web services.

5.1.1. APPROACH TOWARDS SEMANTIC BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT:

Demonstrating and explaining each existing atomic and composite process semantically within an organization as a SWS in a process repository.

Capturing the comprehensive IT landscape in the form of hardware, operating system, manufacturing equipment in the form of ontology.

Collect domain knowledge, technical restrictions and business rules and store it in the form of axioms in a rule language.

Map transactional data from the heterogeneous systems to an instance store.

Considering SWS execution environment for the mediation between business goals and queries, and the actual process scope.

5.1.2. EFFECTIVENESS OF SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES FRAMEWORKS FOR BPM:

WSMO is an abstract framework for Semantic Web Services that delivers modelling constructs required but do not report implementation details.

WSMO provide all the modelling primitives from requirement analysis, but creating ontology by engineering means or semi-automatically and determining axioms is outside the scope of WSMO.

Querying the facts containing support for reasoning and comprehensive discovery of the process.

5.2. SEMANTIC BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT IN ENTERPRISES:

Supply chain process is a core business process in an enterprise which correlates production, logistics and information. Implementing key aspect of SBPM is the semantic annotation process model. Semantic annotation of process model provides a basis for sharing concepts and knowledge about process, reusing process fragments, integrating of processes from various partners and automatically developing IT implementation of process models. Ontology-base semantic technologies could assist teamwork and integration within and between organizations therefore permitting unified information flows and higher automation between organizations leading to augmented overall performance. According to (R.Meersman et al., 2010) ontology-based semantic aid management of knowledge, business processes, and various systems that are needed to be up-to-date in order to achieve a high performing PMS, thus leading to supply Chain wide Project management process integration.

5.3. SEMANTIC BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE FOR WEB SERVICES:

The semantic web technologies permits machine supported data interpretation ontologies as data model and web services technologies will allow automated discovery, selection, composition and web-based execution of services. The idea of Semantic web services is to deliver an integrated solution for the realization of the next generation of the Web that would be intelligent, readable and interoperable.

Diagrammatic representation of SBPM Architecture from (Rivera et al., 2008)

(Rivera et al., 2008) emphasize on a different approach and framework for SBPM using web services from (Hepp, Martin et al., 2005) using Semantic Annotations for Web Services Descriptive Language (SAWSDL) and Xml Schema. The layered architecture can provide enhanced and semantically rich representation. SAWSDL provides a mechanism in which the concept of semantic models described outside the WSDL document can be referred with WSDL document and XML Schema components using annotations.

As exposed in the diagram there are three layers used in the proposed framework, Capture layer, knowledge layer and plumbing layer.

According to (Rivera et al., 2008) SAWSDL can be used for plotting the types and elements of Xml schema or WSDL documents of web services to the conceptions highlighted in ontologies like WSMO.

CONCLUSION:

In relation with applied work carried out in the team and evidences from various research papers, semantically annotating a process or expressing a domain, formalization and building taxonomies provide ease for sharing conceptualization of a particular domain or business process. Organizations must embrace ontologies and Semantic technologies to present the enhanced understanding and concept of business processes before implementing and having a clear picture and dependencies.