An Integrated View of Data: Application of Knowledge Modeling to Data Management

Data management has become an important challenge. Good data management requires an effective approach to collecting, storing, and accessing data across the enterprise. In this paper, a knowledge modeling approach to data management is introduced with an emphasis on data requirements analysis. A knowledge model can provide a high-level view of organizational data by specifying the structure and relationships of the knowledge contents used in business processes. The proposed knowledge modeling approach is business process oriented and decision oriented. The description of the knowledge contents in the model is based on ontological specification. The model is comprised of five elements: work product, work unit, producer, stage, and modeling language. The elements of the model and the modeling process are elaborated. The proposed modeling approach is applied to the vessel chartering process in a shipping company to demonstrate its application in real-world practices

An ontological approach to logistics

In today’s global market, the competitiveness of enterprises is strongly dictated by their ability to collaborate with other enterprises. Ontologies enable common understanding of concepts and have been acknowledged as a powerful means to foster collaboration, both within the boundaries of an individual enterprise (intra-enterprise) as outside these boundaries (inter-enterprise). This paper argues that the use of ontologies can be beneficial for enterprise interoperability in the logistics domain, to improve communication and foster knowledge reuse, to facilitate the integration of existing systems and to support the development process of software solutions. Our experience shows that the development of ontologies for logistics is not a trivial task, and guidelines and best practices are necessary in this domain, especially to bridge the gap between theory and practice. On the one hand, proper theoretical and methodological support for ontology engineering is necessary in order to deliver precise, consistent and well-founded solutions to the market. On the other hand, solutions to practical issues should be provided and not take too long to be produced in order not to be detached from the original real market needs. This paper proposes an ontological approach for logistics that balances the trade-off between precision and pragmatism, by combining top-down and bottom-up practices for ontology engineering. From a top-down perspective, we promote the reuse of existing general-purpose (upper) ontologies and specialize them for the purpose of logistics. From a bottom-up perspective, we reuse code lists and classifications that already exist in logistics to support the creation of instances of our upper level concepts. The paper also presents a representative fragment of our core ontology for logistics and identifies areas for further work in ontology engineering for logistics

An Ontological Approach to Representing the Product Life Cycle

The ability to access and share data is key to optimizing and streamlining any industrial production process. Unfortunately, the manufacturing industry is stymied by a lack of interoperability among the systems by which data are produced and managed, and this is true both within and across organizations. In this paper, we describe our work to address this problem through the creation of a suite of modular ontologies representing the product life cycle and its successive phases, from design to end of life. We call this suite the Product Life Cycle (PLC) Ontologies. The suite extends proximately from The Common Core Ontologies (CCO) used widely in defense and intelligence circles, and ultimately from the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which serves as top level ontology for the CCO and for some 300 further ontologies. The PLC Ontologies were developed together, but they have been factored to cover particular domains such as design, manufacturing processes, and tools. We argue that these ontologies, when used together with standard public domain alignment and browsing tools created within the context of the Semantic Web, may offer a low-cost approach to solving increasingly costly problems of data management in the manufacturing industry

Integrating the goal and business process perspectives in information system analysis

There are several motivations to promote investment and scientific effort in the integration of intentional and operational perspectives: organisational reengineering, continuous improvement of business processes, alignment among complementary analysis perspectives, information traceability, etc. In this paper we propose the integration of two modelling languages that support the creation of goal and business process models: the i* goal-oriented modelling method and Communication Analysis, a communication-oriented business process modelling method. We describe the methodological integration of the two modelling methods with the aim of fulfilling several criteria: i) to rely on appropriate theories; ii) to provide abstract and concrete syntaxes; iii) to provide scenarios of application; and iv) to develop tool support. We provide guidelines for using the two modelling methods in a top-down analysis scenario. We also present an illustrative case that demonstrates the feasibility of the approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

GoBIS: An integrated framework to analyse the goal and business process perspectives in information systems

[EN] Context Organisational reengineering, continuous process improvement, alignment among complementary analysis perspectives, and information traceability are some current motivations to promote investment and scientific effort for integrating goal and business process perspectives. Providing support to integrate information systems analysis becomes a challenge in this complex setting. Objective The GoBIS framework integrates two goal and business process modelling approaches: i⁎ (a goal-oriented modelling method) and Communication Analysis (a communication-oriented business process modelling method). Method In this paper, we describe the methodological integration of both methods with the aim of fulfilling several criteria: i) to rely on appropriate theories; ii) to provide abstract and concrete syntaxes; iii) to provide scenarios of application; iv) to develop tool support; v) to provide demonstrable benefits to potential adopters. Results We provide guidelines for using the two modelling methods in a top-down analysis scenario. The guidelines are validated by means of a comparative experiment and a focus-group session with students. Conclusions From a practitioner viewpoint (modeller and/or analyst), the guidelines facilitate the traceability between goal and business process models, the experimental results highlight the benefits of GoBIS in performance and usability perceptions, and demonstrate an improvement on the completeness of the latter having an impact on efficiency. From a researcher perspective, the validation has produced useful feedback for future research.This work has been supported by the Spanish MICINN Project ProS-Req (TIN2010-19130-C02-01, TIN2010-19130-C02-02) and EOSSAC (TIN2013-44641-P); the Generalitat Valenciana Project IDEO (PROMETEOII/2014/039); the FPI-UPV Pre-Doctoral Grant; the European Commission Project CaaS (FP7 611351); and the ERDF Structural Funds.Ruiz Carmona, LM.; Costal, D.; España Cubillo, S.; Franch, X.; Pastor López, O. (2015). GoBIS: An integrated framework to analyse the goal and business process perspectives in information systems. Information Systems. 53:330-345. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2015.03.007S3303455

The emergence of information systems: a communication-based theory

An information system is more than just the information technology; it is the system that emerges from the complex interactions and relationships between the information technology and the organization. However, what impact information technology has on an organization and how organizational structures and organizational change influence information technology remains an open question. We propose a theory to explain how communication structures emerge and adapt to environmental changes. We operationalize the interplay of information technology and organization as language communities whose members use and develop domain-specific languages for communication. Our theory is anchored in the philosophy of language. In developing it as an emergent perspective, we argue that information systems are self-organizing and that control of this ability is disseminated throughout the system itself, to the members of the language community. Information technology influences the dynamics of this adaptation process as a fundamental constraint leading to perturbations for the information system. We demonstrate how this view is separated from the entanglement in practice perspective and show that this understanding has far-reaching consequences for developing, managing, and examining information systems

Supporting Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery for Enterprise Application Integration

The availability of sophisticated Web service discovery mechanisms is an essential prerequisite for increasing the levels of efficiency and automation in EAI. In this chapter, we present an approach for developing service registries building on the UDDI standard and offering semantically-enhanced publication and discovery capabilities in order to overcome some of the known limitations of conventional service registries. The approach aspires to promote efficiency in EAI in a number of ways, but primarily by automating the task of evaluating service integrability on the basis of the input and output messages that are defined in the Web service’s interface. The presented solution combines the use of three technology standards to meet its objectives: OWL-DL, for modelling service characteristics and performing fine-grained service matchmaking via DL reasoning, SAWSDL, for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces, and UDDI, for storing and retrieving syntactic and semantic information about services and service providers

An Ontological Approach for Organizing a Knowledge Base to Share and Reuse Business Workflow Templates

International audienceBusiness process models have been used in a lot of enterprise applications. Along with their popularity, the problem of how to create them correctly in terms of semantics and syntax while effectively promoting the reuse of suitable parts of existing models is increasingly interest. This paper describes how to organize a knowledge base to facilitate the shareability and reusability of business workflow templates. We first introduce a repository consisting of business workflow templates which are well-checked at the syntactic and semantic level. An organizational mechanism for control flow-based business workflow templates is therefore provided to ensure an effective search of templates. We then propose a process for developing workflow templates. Thereby for each use case, users can select and modify suitable workflow templates from the knowledge base