=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2280/paper-07
|storemode=property
|title=Business Modeling Using Ontologies
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2280/paper-07.pdf
|volume=Vol-2280
|authors=Endri Xhina,Jonida Shehu
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/rtacsit/XhinaS18
}}
==Business Modeling Using Ontologies==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2280/paper-07.pdf
Business Modeling Using Ontologies
Endrit Xhina Jonida Shehu
Department of Informatics Department of Informatics
Faculty of Natural Sciences, Faculty of Natural Sciences,
University of Tirana University of Tirana
endri.xhina@fshn.edu.al jonida.shehu@fshn.edu.al
to make better decisions, to improve marketing and to
offer better customer support. As discussed by
[OPP+04] Information and Communication
Abstract Technology (ICT) has increased the number of
possible business configurations a company can adopt.
Business Modeling has become more popular
In other words, firms can increasingly work in
in the recent years. The idea behind this
partnerships, offer joint value propositions, build-up
concept is to represent every aspect of a
multi-channel and multi-owned distribution networks
business, by creating models that are effective
and profit from diversified and shared revenue streams.
in problem solving, that ease the
According to this we can say that the number of actors
communication with customers and allow the
participating in business tends to increase, and it is
company to stay competitive in e-business.
clear that we need a better understanding of the
Business success nowadays means to
relationships that exist between different actors and
introduce innovations of information
different channels, also to determine their role in
technology. The relation between these two
business processes and workflow.
domains is essential for a business to make
The use of ontologies when modeling a business
better decisions, to improve marketing and to
creates a complete view of all business components
offer better customer support. Through
and adds reasoning skills by enabling tracking of
information technology, businesses can use
problems that may occur in different business
real time monitoring and virtual reality in
activities. In the simplest case [GUA98], an ontology
order to detect many problems in the overall
describes a hierarchy of concepts related by
business performance. In this paper, we
subsumption relationships; in more sophisticated cases,
discuss about business modeling concepts,
suitable axioms are added in order to express other
web semantics technologies and the benefits
relationships between concepts and to constrain their
of using ontologies to model business domain
intended interpretation.
and improve business processes. Finally, we
As discussed by [ILA+07] the ontologies related to
propose a case study in which we can convert
business developed in two branches: one is called
BPMN schemas in business process ontology.
enterprise ontologies and the other describes the
concepts related to business transactions. In this paper
1. Introduction we discuss the benefits of modeling a business in
A business model is a simple representation of the general and we focus more on the use of ontologies
complex reality of a business. The primary purpose of especially in business domain and the relation between
a business model is to communicate something about BPMN1 and ontologies.
the business to other people: employees, customers,
partners, or suppliers [BZ+09]. A business model is 2. Previous Work
necessary because it captures business goals and shows
efficiently how to achieve these goals. Building a There are many solutions and researches regarding
business model also encourage executives to see the use of web semantics and ontologies to model
another perspective of what is significant to customers business activities and processes. In dissertation
and how to best deliver services or products to them. [OST+04] discussed about the need to have a rigorous
Business success nowadays means to introduce model describing the concepts of a business model,
innovations of information technology. The relation
between these two domains is essential for a business 1
Business Process Model and Notation
thus by building a business model ontology (BMO) he 3. BPMN and Ontology
is building on existing knowledge of the domain the
ontology describes the terms, elements, attributes and BPMN is a standard notation used by businesses as
relationships of the business model concept. The a common graphical language for modeling business
ontology has been applied in a real life case study MJF processes. Visualization through diagrams enables
in order to see the ontology's applicability to a real- diverse business users to easily understand business
world. Also a BM2L language is built which in activities and processes. Business analysts need a
combination with the off-the-shelf XML tool xmlspy is standard notation to design business processes, in the
comparable to a CASE tool. same way business users require the same standard to
Another ontology is REA (Resource-Event-Actor) manage and observe this processes. BPMN provides a
designed firstly by [McC82]. The main concepts in the set of elements Figure 1, which have different shapes
REA ontology are Resource, Event, and Actor. In their and specific meaning. These elements are simple and
study REA model can be used in the design of complex intuitive and can be used for different types of
object accounting system by addressing and solving diagrams like process diagram, choreography diagram
different issues like proper balance between the or conversation diagram.
declarative and procedural features of an accounting
database.
In [GAV+00] they propose an e3-value ontology in
a number of industrial e-business development
projects. The main concepts in e3-value are actors,
value objects, value ports, value interfaces, value
activities and value exchanges. They argue that an e-
business model and a process model differ in a number
of ways, i.e. the concepts in e-business modeling are
centered around the notion of value, while in process
modeling concepts focus on how a process should be
carried out in operational terms or in an e-business
model, an actor adds value, while in a process model
an actor performs an operational process.
In [ABEI+06] have presented a common ontology
based on three business ontologies the e3 -value, REA
and BMO. They constructed the common ontology
primarily in order to gain a better understanding of the
Figure 1. Samples of the BPMN diagramming
original ontologies. The work has shown that there is a
symbols (Source: https://study.com/academy/lesson/
considerable overlap between these three ontologies
business-process-model-and-notation-process-
but that there are also differences, some obvious and
examples.html)
some subtle. They have modeled a number of business
scenarios using the common ontology and by doing so
As explained in BPMN specification [OMG10]
discovered differences between concepts in the original
these elements reside in five basic categories:
ontologies that at first might have been seen as
1. Flow Objects
identical. As mentioned above, the use of ontologies
2. Data
can be applied in every area not only in business. Of
3. Connecting Objects
particular interest is the modeling of government
4. Swimlanes
services [SHXH18] using ontologies. Since the
5. Artifacts
economy sector is of major importance to the
Flow Objects are the main graphical elements to
government, the application of business models based
define the behavior of a Business Process. There are
on ontology leads to benefits in terms of economic
three Flow Objects: Events, Activities, and Gateways.
prosperity.
A traditional requirement of Process modeling is to domain: activities, customers, suppliers, cost structure,
be able to model the items (physical or information market, channels are some important concepts.
items) this is realized with data elements that are Every element in BPMN Specification can be
created, manipulated, and used during the execution of transformed in a class in ontology and the relations
a Process. Data is represented with the four elements: between elements can also be converted to relations
Data Objects, Data Inputs, Data Outputs, Data Stores. between objects and classes in ontology. If we have a
To connect Flow Objects to each other or other BPMN business process diagram we would like to add
information, four Connecting Objects are used: additional information for a task or an event. Another
Sequence Flows, Message Flows, Associations, and relevant issue is to be able to retrieve additional
Data Associations. information i.e. knowing if an activity performs better,
There are two ways of grouping the primary when the process is designed with a specific event like
modeling elements through “Swimlanes:” message or time. Therefore by using semantic
1. Pools knowledge we can query the designed ontology based
2. Lanes on BPMN and get the desired results. Queries in
Artifacts are used to provide additional information ontology are performed by using SPARQL3, SPARQL
about the Process. There are two standardized stands for (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query
Artifacts, but modelers or modeling tools are free to Language) it can be used to express queries across
add as many Artifacts as necessary. There could be diverse data sources. As discussed by [NAT11] the
additional BPMN efforts to standardize a larger set of BPMN 2.0 specification [OMG10] provides a
Artifacts for general use or for vertical markets. The metamodel for BPMN elements as a UML class
current set of Artifacts includes: Group and Text diagram and in the form of an XML schema. So based
Annotation. More detailed information about the on metamodel for BPMN elements as a UML class
categories and each element symbol are given in the diagram Figure 2 the ontology can be easily converted
BPMN specification [OMG10]. in classes and attributes and relationships between
them.
3.1 Case study from BPMN process to Ontology
In previous versions of BPMN it was relatively
difficult to exchange BPMN models. In BPMN 2.0 the
specification defines a standardized exchange format.
This standard is supported by many tools vendors
[ALLW16], so now we can easily exchange BPMN
models not only between different modeling tools but
also between a modeling tool and a BPMS2.
Since every business process can be explained with
BPMN standard and it also offers now a way to create Figure 2. Process Details Class Diagram (Source:
platform-independent exchange of BPMN 2.0 http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0 )
diagrams by generating XML file formats we can
easily propose an idea of enriching BPMN process
diagrams with semantics. As defined by [AGHH12], in For example in our ontology we can declare a class
general, an ontology describes formally a domain of Process which might have attributes like Public or
discourse. Typically, an ontology consists of a finite Private, we can than declare a subclass FlowElement
list of terms and the relationships between these terms. and for FlowElement another subclass Activity.
The terms denote important concepts (classes of Another class in relation with the Process would be
objects) of the domain. For example, in business ResourceRole. The individuals in this class are specific
due to the role of different resources involved in the
2 3
Business Process Management Software https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/
process. So we can compose the manual conversion of work, we plan to develop a prototype based on the case
all classes and their attributes defined in the process study above to convert from BPMN process diagrams
class diagram and other diagrams as that of the activity, to ontology in order to easily exchange information
but an automatic solution would facilitate this between them.
procedure. The figure below proposes the steps that
would convert from bpmn to xml and ontology References
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