=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-514/paper-8
|storemode=property
|title=MoKi: A Collaborative Enterprise Modelling Tool
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-514/paper8.pdf
|volume=Vol-514
}}
==MoKi: A Collaborative Enterprise Modelling Tool==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-514/paper8.pdf
MoKi: A Collaborative Enterprise Modelling
Tool
Chiara Ghidini1 , Barbara Kump2 , Stefanie Lindstaedt2,3 , Nahid Mahbub1 ,
Viktoria Pammer2,3 , Marco Rospocher1 , and Luciano Serafini1
1
FBK-irst. Via Sommarive 18 Povo, 38123,Trento, Italy
2
Knowledge Management Institute, TU Graz. Inffeldgasse 21a, 8010 Graz, Austria
3
Know-Center. Inffeldgasse 21a, 8010 Graz, Austria.
Introduction Enterprise modelling is the process of creating an enterprise
model, that is a structured description representing the relevant aspects of an
enterprise. Among the relevant aspects of an enterprise which are often modelled
are the business processes, the business domain, skills required by the employees,
business models endorsed by the enterprise etc. Building an enterprise model is
not a trivial task and usually requires the collaboration of different actors. These
different actors usually have different degrees of expertise on (i) the knowledge to
be modelled, (ii) the ability of encoding such knowledge into formal computer-
processable statements, and (iii) the ability of integrating different aspects of
an enterprise (e.g. processes, information) into a uniform and coherent vision.
To support these different actors we foresee a system in which content can be
represented at different degrees of formality. This will allow domain experts to
create, review and modify models at a rather informal/human intelligible level,
and knowledge engineers to check the quality of the formal definitions and their
correspondence with the informal parts they intend to represent. Translation
between different levels of formality should be as much automatised as possible,
in order not to increase the overhead of human work. To support a coherent
development and integration of the different components of the enterprise model
we also foresee a tool in which all the relevant aspects of an enterprise can be
modelled in a collaborative and cooperative manner, thus exploiting the synergy
of “having to think the same thing out only once”. In this system demonstra-
tion we present MoKi (Modelling Wiki), a Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) based
tool aiming at meeting the vision above described. MoKi is a collaborative tool
that (i) supports access to the enterprise model at different levels of formality
(informal, semi-formal and formal), (ii) supports integrated modelling of several
aspects of an enterprise, and (iii) ensures a coherent development of the formal
part. In the current implementation of MoKi we focus on an enterprise model
describing the domain and the processes of an enterprise. The choice of these
aspects was originally motivated by the EU-project APOSDLE4 .
Describing knowledge in a MoKi page The main idea behind MoKi is that an
enterprise model is expressed as a collection of interrelated wiki pages connected
by typed links. Model elements (domain concepts, properties, processes) are
4
www.aposdle.org
CEUR
ceur-ws.org
Workshop ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings
associated to MoKi pages which contain informal but structured information
about the element itself. The typical MoKi page is usually composed of two
parts. In the structured part the element is described by means of triplets of
the form (subject, relation, object), with the element itself playing the role of
the subject; the purpose of this part is to represent the connection between the
elements of the enterprise model. In the informal part, the element is described
mainly using natural language sentences (images or drawings can be attached
as well); the purpose of this part is to enrich the description of the model by
documenting it and clarifying it to users not trained in the formal representation.
The user fills a page via forms, so he/she does not need to know any particu-
lar syntax or language to participate in the creation of the enterprise model. All
the actors involved in the modelling activities can also interact with each others
and exchange further ideas and comments using the SMW’s built-in discussion
functionality.
Functionalities of MoKi To support modelling, MoKi provides groups of func-
tionalities, described below, that can be accessed via a wiki-style menu bar.
Import. These functionalities provide support for (i) importing pre-existing
structured knowledge (e.g. OWL domain ontologies, list of domain concepts
organized in a simple textual structure), and (ii) extracting relevant terms
from digital resources.
Model Management. This set of functionalities supplies the basic function-
ality each modelling tool necessarily provides: creating, editing and deleting
model elements. In particular, processes can be easily described using an
integrated lightweight graphical editor.
Visualization. These functionalities give the actors a graphical overviews of
the models. For example, the taxonomy and partonomy of business domain
concepts are visualised as trees. Additionally, the taxonomy and partonomy
can be directly manipulated via these visualisations.
Revision. These functionalities support the revision of the enterprise model.
For instance, automatic checks analyse properties of business domain con-
cepts and list those concepts which may need revision, based on experiences
general rules-of-thumb in knowledge engineering.
Export. These functionalities support the fully automatic export of knowledge
of the enterprise model into standard knowledge representation languages.
At the moment the supported formalism is OWL for the whole enterprise
model. Processes can also be exported separately in a BPMN specification
(eRDF serialisation).
MoKi is built to facilitate the plugging-in of new or existing state-of-the-art tools.
We plan to use this feature to add further functionalities in the future, e.g. tools
providing knowledge elicitation techniques like card-sorting or laddering. We are
currently extending MoKi to support modelling of individuals. A demo version
of MoKi can be tried out on-line at moki.fbk.eu. A detailed description of the
current version of MoKi is contained in the MoKi manual, available at the MoKi
web site.