Process ontology

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In philosophy, a process ontology refers to a universal model of the structure of the world as an ordered wholeness. [1] [2] Such ontologies are fundamental ontologies, in contrast to the so-called applied ontologies. Fundamental ontologies do not claim to be accessible to any empirical proof in itself but to be a structural design pattern, out of which empirical phenomena can be explained and put together consistently. Throughout Western history, the dominating fundamental ontology is the so-called substance theory. However, fundamental process ontologies have become more important in recent times, because the progress in the discovery of the foundations of physics has spurred the development of a basic concept able to integrate such boundary notions as "energy," "object", and those of the physical dimensions of space and time.

Contents

In computer science, a process ontology is a description of the components and their relationships that make up a process. A formal process ontology is an ontology in the knowledge domain of operations. Often such ontologies take advantage of the benefits of an upper ontology. Planning software can be used to perform plan generation based on the formal description of the process and its constraints. Numerous efforts have been made to define a process/planning ontology. [3]

Processes

A process may be defined as a set of transformations of input elements into output elements with specific properties, with the transformations characterized by parameters and constraints, such as in manufacturing or biology. A process may also be defined as the workflows and sequence of events inherent in processes such as manufacturing, engineering and business processes.

Ontologies

PSL

The Process Specification Language (PSL) is a process ontology developed for the formal description and modeling of basic manufacturing, engineering and business processes. This ontology provides a vocabulary of classes and relations for concepts at the ground level of event-instances, object-instances, and timepoints. PSL’s top level is built around the following: [4]

Cyc

In a process/planning ontology developed for the ontology Cyc, classes and relations above the ground level of PSL allow processes to be described purely at the type-level. [5] [6] The ground level of PSL uses the primitives of event-instance, object-instance, and timepoint description. The types above the ground level of PSL have also been expressed in PSL, showing that the type-level and the ground level are relatively independent. The type-levels for the Cyc process ontology above this ground level use the following concepts:

SUPER and DDPO

The project SUPER [7] (Semantics Utilised for Process management within and between EnteRprises) has a goal of the definition of ontologies for Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM), but these ontologies can be reused in diverse environments. Part of this project is to define an Upper Process Ontology (UPO) that ties together all other SUPER ontologies. The results of the project SUPER include the UPO and a set of ontologies for processes and organizations. [8] [9] Most of the ontologies are written in WSML, and some are also written in OCML.

A candidate model for the UPO was DDPO [10] (DOLCE+DnS Plan Ontology), a planning ontology which specifies plans and distinguishes between abstract and executable plans. DOLCE [11] [12] (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering) aims at capturing the ontological categories underlying natural language and human commonsense. DnS (Descriptions and Situations), is a constructivist ontology that allows for context-sensitive redescriptions of the types and relations postulated by other given ontologies (or ground vocabularies). Together in DDPO, DOLCE and DnS are used to build a Plan Ontology that includes physical and non-physical objects (social entities, mental objects and states, conceptualizations, information objects, constraints), events, states, regions, qualities, and constructivist situations. The main target of DDPO is tasks, namely the types of actions, their sequencing, and the controls performed on them.

oXPDL

The ontology oXPDL [13] is a process interchange ontology based on the standardised XML Process Definition Language (XPDL). The purpose of oXPDL is to model the semantics of XPDL process models in standardized Web ontology languages such as OWL and WSML, while incorporating features of existing standard ontologies such as PSL, RosettaNet, and SUMO.

GFO

The General Formal Ontology [14] [15] (GFO) is an ontology integrating processes and objects. GFO includes elaborations of categories like objects, processes, time and space, properties, relations, roles, functions, facts, and situations. GFO allows for different axiomatizations of its categories, such as the existence of atomic time-intervals vs. dense time. Two of the specialties of GFO are its account of persistence and its time model. Regarding persistence, the distinction between endurants (objects) and perdurants (processes) is made explicit within GFO by the introduction of a special category, a persistant[ sic ]. A persistant is a special category with the intention that its instances "remain identical" over time. With respect to time, time intervals are taken as primitive in GFO, and time-points (called "time boundaries") are derived. Moreover, time-points may coincide, which is convenient for modelling instantaneous changes.

m3po and m3pl

The multi metamodel process ontology [16] [17] (m3po) combines workflows and choreography descriptions so that it can be used as a process interchange ontology. For internal business processes, Workflow Management Systems are used for process modelling and allow describing and executing business processes. [18] For external business processes, choreography descriptions are used to describe how business partners can cooperate. A choreography can be considered to be a view of an internal business process with the internal logic not visible, similar to public views on private workflows. [19] [20] [21] The m3po ontology unifies both internal and external business processes, combining reference models and languages from the workflow and choreography domains. The m3po ontology is written in WSML. The related ontology m3pl, written in PSL using the extension FLOWS (First Order Logic for Web Services), enables the extraction of choreography interfaces from workflow models. [22]

The m3po ontology combines features of the following reference models and languages:

The m3po ontology is organized using five key aspects of workflow specifications and workflow management. [23] Because different workflow models put a different emphasis on the five aspects, the most elaborate reference model for each aspect was used and combined into m3po.

See also

Related Research Articles

In information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains of discourse. More simply, an ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of concepts and categories that represent the subject.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workflow</span> Pattern of activity often with a result

A workflow is a generic term for orchestrated and repeatable patterns of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of operations, the work of a person or group, the work of an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms.

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for various domains: the nouns representing classes of objects and the verbs representing relations between the objects.

The Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), commonly known as BPEL, is an OASIS standard executable language for specifying actions within business processes with web services. Processes in BPEL export and import information by using web service interfaces exclusively.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business process modeling</span> Activity of representing processes of an enterprise

Business process modeling (BPM) in business process management and systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current business processes may be analyzed, improved, and automated. BPM is typically performed by business analysts, who provide expertise in the modeling discipline; by subject matter experts, who have specialized knowledge of the processes being modeled; or more commonly by a team comprising both. Alternatively, the process model can be derived directly from events' logs using process mining tools.

The semantic spectrum is a series of increasingly precise or rather semantically expressive definitions for data elements in knowledge representations, especially for machine use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business Process Model and Notation</span> Graphical representation for specifying business processes

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model.

In information science, an upper ontology is an ontology which consists of very general terms that are common across all domains. An important function of an upper ontology is to support broad semantic interoperability among a large number of domain-specific ontologies by providing a common starting point for the formulation of definitions. Terms in the domain ontology are ranked under the terms in the upper ontology, e.g., the upper ontology classes are superclasses or supersets of all the classes in the domain ontologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XPDL</span>

The XML Process Definition Language (XPDL) is a format standardized by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) to interchange business process definitions between different workflow products, i.e. between different modeling tools and management suites. XPDL defines an XML schema for specifying the declarative part of workflow / business process.

The Process Specification Language (PSL) is a set of logic terms used to describe processes. The logic terms are specified in an ontology that provides a formal description of the components and their relationships that make up a process. The ontology was developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and has been approved as an international standard in the document ISO 18629.

The general formal ontology (GFO) is an upper ontology integrating processes and objects. GFO has been developed by Heinrich Herre, Barbara Heller and collaborators in Leipzig. Although GFO provides one taxonomic tree, different axiom systems may be chosen for its modules. In this sense, GFO provides a framework for building custom, domain-specific ontologies. GFO exhibits a three-layered meta-ontological architecture consisting of an abstract top level, an abstract core level, and a basic level. Primarily, the ontology GFO:

The ISO 15926 is a standard for data integration, sharing, exchange, and hand-over between computer systems.

YAWL is a workflow language based on workflow patterns. It is supported by a software system that includes an execution engine, a graphical editor and a worklist handler. It is available as open-source software under the LGPL license.

In philosophy, the term formal ontology is used to refer to an ontology defined by axioms in a formal language with the goal to provide an unbiased view on reality, which can help the modeler of domain- or application-specific ontologies to avoid possibly erroneous ontological assumptions encountered in modeling large-scale ontologies.

Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) is an XML-based language for business process modeling. It was maintained by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) until June 2005 when BPMI and Object Management Group announced the merger of their respective business process management activities to form the Business Modeling and Integration Domain Task Force. It is deprecated since 2008. BPML was useful to OMG in order to enrich UML with process notation.

The Business Process Definition Metamodel (BPDM) is a standard definition of concepts used to express business process models, adopted by the OMG. Metamodels define concepts, relationships, and semantics for exchange of user models between different modeling tools. The exchange format is defined by XSD and XMI, a specification for transformation of OMG metamodels to XML. Pursuant to the OMG's policies, the metamodel is the result of an open process involving submissions by member organizations, following a Request for Proposal (RFP) issued in 2003. BPDM was adopted in initial form in July 2007, and finalized in July 2008.

Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) was a consortium formed to define standards for the interoperability of workflow management systems. The coalition was disbanded in 2019 and no longer exists.

ProActive Parallel Suite is an open-source software for enterprise workload orchestration, part of the OW2 community. A workflow model allows a set of executables or scripts, written in any language, to be defined along with their dependencies, so ProActive Parallel Suite can schedule and orchestrate executions while optimising the use of computational resources.

Contemporary ontologies share many structural similarities, regardless of the ontology language in which they are expressed. Most ontologies describe individuals (instances), classes (concepts), attributes, and relations.

Knowledge extraction is the creation of knowledge from structured and unstructured sources. The resulting knowledge needs to be in a machine-readable and machine-interpretable format and must represent knowledge in a manner that facilitates inferencing. Although it is methodically similar to information extraction (NLP) and ETL, the main criterion is that the extraction result goes beyond the creation of structured information or the transformation into a relational schema. It requires either the reuse of existing formal knowledge or the generation of a schema based on the source data.

References

  1. ↑ Rescher, Nicholas. "Process Philosophy". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Cf. Michel Weber (ed.), After Whitehead: Rescher on Process Metaphysics , Frankfurt / Paris / Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, 2004
  2. ↑ Sohst, Wolfgang (2009). Prozessontologie. Ein systematischer Entwurf der Entstehung von Existenz. Berlin. ISBN   978-3-936532-60-9. Archived from the original on 2010-08-27.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  3. ↑ Gangemi, A., Borgo, S., Catenacci, C., and Lehman, J. (2005). "Task taxonomies for knowledge content (deliverable D07)" (PDF). Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA). pp. 9–26.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ↑ Gangemi, A., Borgo, S., Catenacci, C., and Lehman, J. (2005). "Task taxonomies for knowledge content (deliverable D07)" (PDF). Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA). p. 16.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  5. ↑ Aitken, Stuart (2001). "Process Representation and Planning in Cyc: From Scripts and Scenes to Constraints" (PDF). Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI), University of Edinburgh.
  6. ↑ Aitken, Stuart; Curtis, Jon (2002). Design of a Process Ontology: Vocabulary, Semantics, and Usage . pp.  263–270. doi:10.1007/3-540-45810-7_13. ISBN   978-3-540-44268-4.{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  7. ↑ "Project IST 026850 SUPER: Business Process Ontology Framework (deliverable 1.1)" (PDF). Information Society Technologies (IST). May 2007.
  8. ↑ "SUPER Ontologies". Information Society Technologies (IST). 2007. Archived from the original on 2007-10-11.
  9. ↑ "Project IST 026850 SUPER: Process Ontology Stack, Evolved Version (deliverable 1.5)" (PDF). Information Society Technologies (IST). March 2009.
  10. ↑ Gangemi, A., Borgo, S., Catenacci, C., and Lehman, J. (2005). "Task taxonomies for knowledge content (deliverable D07)" (PDF). Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA). pp. 27–66.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  11. ↑ Masolo, Claudio; Borgo, Stefano; Gangemi, Aldo; Guarino, Nicola; Oltramari, Alessandro (c. 2002). "WonderWeb Deliverable D18: Ontology Library" (PDF). Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA).
  12. ↑ "DOLCE: a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering". Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA).
  13. ↑ Haller, Armin; Marmolowski, Mateusz; Oren, Eyal; Gaaloul, Walid (April 2008). "A Process Ontology for Business Intelligence" (PDF). Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI).
  14. ↑ "General Formal Ontology (GFO)". University of Leipzig: Ontologies in Medicine and Life Sciences (Onto-Med).
  15. ↑ Herre, Heinrich (2010). "General Formal Ontology (GFO): A Foundational Ontology for Conceptual Modelling" (PDF). IMISE University of Leipzig: Research Department Ontologies in Medicine and Life Sciences (Onto-Med).
  16. ↑ Haller, Armin; Oren, Eyal (February 2006). "A process ontology to represent semantics of different process and choreography meta-models" (PDF). National University of Ireland, Galway: Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI).
  17. ↑ Haller, A.; Oren, E.; Kotinurmi, P. (September 2006). "m3po: An Ontology to Relate Choreographies to Workflow Models" (PDF). Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Services Computing (SCC).
  18. ↑ Georgakopoulos, D.; Hornick, M.; Sheth, A. (1995). "An overview of workflow management: From process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure". Distributed and Parallel Databases. 3 (2): 119–153. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.101.5199 . doi:10.1007/bf01277643. S2CID   446699.
  19. ↑ Chiu, D. K. W.; et al. (2004). "Workflow view driven cross-organizational interoperability in a web service environment". Inf. Tech. And Management. 5 (3–4): 221–250. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.648.5148 . doi:10.1023/b:item.0000031580.57966.d4. S2CID   40564279.
  20. ↑ Dijkmanm, R.; Dumas, M. (December 2004). "Service-oriented design: A multi-viewpoint approach" (PDF). International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. 13 (4): 337–368. doi:10.1142/s0218843004001012.
  21. ↑ Schulz, K. A.; Orlowska, M. E. (2004). "Facilitating cross-organisational workflows with a workflow view approach". Data Knowl. Eng. 51 (1): 109–147. doi:10.1016/j.datak.2004.03.008.
  22. ↑ Haller, A.; Oren, E. (June 2006). "m3pl: A Work-FLOWS ontology extension to extract choreography interfaces" (PDF). Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantics for Business Process Management, in Conjunction with ESWC2006.
  23. ↑ Jablonski, S.; Bussler, C. (1996). Workflow Management: Modeling Concepts, Architecture and Implementation. International Thomson Computer Press.
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