An ontological approach for recovering legacy business content

Legacy Information Systems (LIS) pose a challenge for many organizations. On one hand, LIS are viewed as aging systems needing replacement; on the other hand, years of accumulated business knowledge have made these systems mission-critical. Current approaches however are often criticized for being overtly dependent on technology and ignoring the business knowledge which resides within LIS. In this light, this paper proposes a means of capturing the business knowledge in a technology agnostic manner and transforming it in a way that reaps the benefits of clear semantic expression - this transformation is achieved via the careful use of ontology. The approach called Content Sophistication (CS) aims to provide a model of the business that more closely adheres to the semantics and relationships of objects existing in the real world. The approach is illustrated via an example taken from a case study concerning the renovation of a large financial system and the outcome of the approach results in technology agnostic models that show improvements along several dimensions

A framework for deriving semantic web services

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario

A Semantic-based framework for discovering business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modeling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. This paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework synthesizes the idea from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Ontology learning for semantic web services

Semantic Web Services promise automatic service discovery and composition, relying heavily on domain ontology as a core component. With large Web Service repository, manual ontology development is proving a bottleneck (with associated expense and likely errors) to the realisation of a semantic Web of services. Providing the appropriate tools that assist in and automate ontology development is essential for a dynamic service vision to be realised. As a statement of research-in-progress, this paper proposes combining different ontology learning paradigms in Web Services domain, highlighting the need for further research that accommodates the variation in Web Service descriptive and operational sources. A research agenda is proposed that recognises this variation in artefacts as they are selected, pre-processed and analyzed by ontology learning techniques

Conceptual modelling and the quality of ontologies: A comparison between object-role modelling and the object paradigm

Ontologies are key enablers for sharing precise and machine-understandable semantics among different applications and parties. Yet, for ontologies to meet these expectations, their quality must be of a good standard. The quality of an ontology is strongly based on the design method employed. This paper addresses the design problems related to the modelling of ontologies, with specific concentration on the issues related to the quality of the conceptualisations produced. The paper aims to demonstrate the impact of the modelling paradigm adopted on the quality of ontological models and, consequently, the potential impact that such a decision can have in relation to the development of software applications. To this aim, an ontology that is conceptualised based on the Object Role Modelling (ORM) approach is re-engineered into a one modelled on the basis of the Object Paradigm (OP). Next, the two ontologies are analytically compared using the specified criteria. The conducted comparison highlights that using the OP for ontology conceptualisation can provide more expressive, reusable, objective and temporal ontologies than those conceptualised on the basis of the ORM approach

Conceptual Modelling and The Quality of Ontologies: Endurantism Vs. Perdurantism

Ontologies are key enablers for sharing precise and machine-understandable semantics among different applications and parties. Yet, for ontologies to meet these expectations, their quality must be of a good standard. The quality of an ontology is strongly based on the design method employed. This paper addresses the design problems related to the modelling of ontologies, with specific concentration on the issues related to the quality of the conceptualisations produced. The paper aims to demonstrate the impact of the modelling paradigm adopted on the quality of ontological models and, consequently, the potential impact that such a decision can have in relation to the development of software applications. To this aim, an ontology that is conceptualised based on the Object-Role Modelling (ORM) approach (a representative of endurantism) is re-engineered into a one modelled on the basis of the Object Paradigm (OP) (a representative of perdurantism). Next, the two ontologies are analytically compared using the specified criteria. The conducted comparison highlights that using the OP for ontology conceptualisation can provide more expressive, reusable, objective and temporal ontologies than those conceptualised on the basis of the ORM approach

Barry Smith an sich

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński