Ontological Considerations For Representing Endurants And Events In Business Models: Essay.

Ontological Nature of Endurants and Events in Business Models

Discuss about the Ontological Considerations about Representation.

The purpose of this study is to consider the Ontology that represent the Endurates and Events based on the business models. The paper will investigate about the ontological nature. The article chosen for the paper to review is the Ontological Considerations about the Representation of Events and Endurants in Business Models. In this article, the Business Endurants and Events are used for the Ontology-Driven Modeling were the Endurants will be discussed in the Structural Conceptual Models (Guizzardi, Guarino and Almeida 2016). It will be represented with the possibility for Endurants change. The article will then illustrate about the events in the process of business models then the Events in the Structural Conceptual Models. Then in the later section will follow it will then compare the current article with the related article that are relevant to Business Process Management. Those articles will also be reviewed and discussed in the paper. Finally, it will conclude with several approaches that were made to develop a relation between the event and Endurants and incorporate the structural conceptual model.

While reviewing the article it was found that there were different disciplines that have established while dealing with the entities that represent the ontological natures that were different. In the business process modelling the focus is mostly on the events and in the structural conceptual modelling the focus is on the objects which is the endurants. The paper has discussed about the impact with the conceptual models that divide event vs endurant. The division has to be bridge with the ontological account. The reality of the business could be more comprehensive with the accounting that provide an ontological difference that was found in the events and the endurants. A business artifact-centric approaches were made in the process discipline while event rectification approach was made in the structural conceptual modelling discipline. The paper has proposed a strucutural conceptual modelling were pattern captures the events. The pattern is the basis that establishes the business process models which has incorporated the references to the endurant and incorporate the references of the structural conceptual models with the events. The business endurant and the business events has two types of Ontology-Driven modelling. For ontology the entities of endurants present with the whole parts. The essential and accidental properties are both available for endurants which means that endurants can change qualitatively in order to maintain the identity. If the accidental properties being considered than their actual properties could have been different from what they actual are. The kind is defined in the technical sense for the accidental and essential properties. Kind has principle of identity, persistence and individualization to define the boundaries and parts the individual have. The Event of the business process model has applied the UFO Ontology that provide a design for agent-oriented modelling language.

Comparison of Ontology-Driven Modeling and Structural Conceptual Models

A similar article was found where the research was about the Unified Foundational Ontology. Guizzardi, Wagner, Almeida and Guizzardi in its article Towards Ontological Foundations for Conceptual Modeling: The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) Story describes about the development of the ontological foundation as a long-term research program which was basically for the conceptual modelling (Guizzardi et al., 2015). The background of the paper theoretical discuss about the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) ontology foundation and its purpose is to develop the engineering tools, methodologies, and theories in a more advance way to make the conceptual modelling theoretically sound discipline. There is a historical context in this paper which describe that UFO briefly discusses about the stratified organization. There is a discussion on the most successful UFO application that was the development of the OntoUML which is the conceptual modelling language. It contains multiple computational and methodological tools that were develop to support the community of OntoUML. The methodologies tools that were used are anti-patterns and ontological patterns. On the other hand, the computational tools that were used are pattern-based model construction, formal model verification, anti-pattern detection, formal model validation, rectification and code generation. In the report various applications were employed for language and its associated tools. The paper even reflects the actual use of OntoUML in practice by the OntoUML community which have influenced both language evolution and UFO core ontological notions. For the developemt of UFO ontology several thoeries were originated which were consistently put together in area such as cognitive science, philosophical and linguistics logics, and formal philosophy ontology. From the study of the paper, it was found that ontology has three different aspects of reality. The first is the UFO-A, were the ontology of endurants mostly deals with the structural conceptual modelling aspects. It comprises of theories of Taxonomic of structure and Type of structure. The second is the UFO-B, were the ontology of Events mostly deals with Event Merelogy, Temporal Event ordering, Object Participation event, Causation, Change and Dispositions connection between Events and Endurants. The third is the UFO-C, were ontology of Intentional and Social Entities were constructed above the UFO-A and UFO-B and it address the notions of Desires, Beliefs, Intentions, Commitments, Goals, Actions, Social Roles and Particularized Relational Complexes, and Claims among the others.

The author Riehle, Jannaber, Delfmann, Thomas and Becker in its article Automatically Annotating Business Process Models with Ontology Concepts at Design-Time has discussed that the use of vocabulary and consistent labelling style improves the quality of process model (Riehle et al., 2017). In this article it has been seen that ontologies that are specific to domain were planned and used so that important knowledge related to process could be capture. Even in some research ontology concepts have been annotated to the process models so that the reason could be interpreted about the process model. Since with annotation they could not gain the traction in practice through manual effort. Thus, a methodology has been provided that is automated and language-independent which uses the functionalities of labelling assistance. It will annotate and identify the relevant concepts of ontology in the element of process model were four-steps of the procedural model can be used. The methodology of automatic annotation of models mainly achieve two things with ontologies. The first thing is that it will assure the terminological standardisation. The second thing is that the ontology concepts would automatically related to process models elements through which it will foster to understand the process elements and with it further enable the analyses of the process based on ontology and assistance of modelling process in the future. In the terminological standardization, automatic annotation is standardised in the business process model. At the design-time, it ensures the terminological standardisation were two essential things are required. One is the domain thesaurus that has a valid words and the other is the naming conventions which is Syntactical.

Incorporating Endurants and Events in Business Process Management

The second key requirement was the Domain ontology that was for automatic annotation of the process model. Here all the organizational concepts are represented. In such ontology some mutual relation and elements are related. The elements of ontology are semantic and the relations are typed semantically. However, the methodology of automatic annotation has some limitations. Though the methodology provides automatic annotation from the concept of ontology for the business processes, still limitation is there in the terminologically standardised ontology. The limitation is further more on the useful need of ontology. Usefulness depends highly on actual ontology and their related content where all the necessary information is used. Thus, from this particular paper it can be reviewed that the author had tried to present the methodology that can automatically annotate the business process model with the concept of ontology.

The third article that has reviewed is about the process of improving the process modelling Koschmider and Reijers in its article discuss about the business process model use in the wide area of enterprise applications (Koschmider and Reijers, 2015). During the study it was found that with the expansion of the business, creation and maintenance concerns are growing. Efficiency has been boost up for creating the business process model with high-quality which is the relevant part of the existing models. However, there are limited support that guides the process modellers for the model content that are appropriate. The paper contains a content-oriented patterns which has been extracted from process model having large set. Patterns are derived with a set of proposed algorithms. A demonstration has been provided in the paper regarding the Domain Process Patterns with regard to the gathered information of their significant usage that support the process model in order to generate the new models. During the process, it has set a website accompanying the Domain Process Pattern. Thus, the author has concluded that modelling language knowledge is not that much sufficient to build a better process models. It actually requires a profound modelling experience and practice the modelling language by applying to it. There were several patterns proposed for the process models design and used the data, resources, control flows or quality constrain in the workflows.

The last article that has been review is about the PrOnto: An Ontology Driven Business Process Mining Tool. In this article, Bistarelli, Di Noia, Mongiello and Nocera had proposed that the tools and techniques of data mining is to identify and extract data from big data, and from implicit patterns (Bistarelli et al., 2017). This patterns and big data were able to describe the static or dynamic phenomena. Through this the business processes started to gain attention more for modern enterprises and organizations by playing some crucial roles.  The solution of performing process mining is to store the data and get know about the processes. In order to extract the description of the process, the workflow modelling will mine the activities, resources and state transitions. The author has presented a prototyping tool, PrOnto that can analyse and extract business process knowledge. Through this they woud be able to disciver the patterns, operations and structures within the events logs. PrOnto actually supports in decision making for the organization. It has tools that exploits the encoded knowledge in the domain of ontology that has describe the process model and provide output with different abstraction levels. The author in its paper had develop ontology to represent the organization. Thus, the author has concluded in the paper about the PrOnto prototype system and its process with a UML and XML diagram model.

Conclusion

From all the articles that were reviewed, it has been concluded that the Business Process Management follows the ontological modelling with two different ontological natures. In the business process modelling the focus is mostly on the events and in the structural conceptual modelling the focus is on the objects which is the endurants. The paper has discussed them both.  The article that has been discussed here and the article of Towards Ontological Foundations for Conceptual Modelling: The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) Story   has some sort of similar content about the UFO which has also been discussed in this paper.    Further in the article Automatically Annotating Business Process Models with Ontology Concepts at Design-Time it uses vocabulary and consistent labelling style to improve the quality of process model and has proposed a domain-specific ontology to capture the knowledge related to the process. Finally, in the last review of the article PrOnto: An Ontology Driven Business Process Mining Tool   the author has discussed about the PrOnto prototype system and its process.

References

Riehle, D.M., Jannaber, S., Delfmann, P., Thomas, O. and Becker, J., 2017, November. Automatically Annotating Business Process Models with Ontology Concepts at Design-Time. In International Conference on Conceptual Modeling(pp. 177-186). Springer, Cham.

Guizzardi, G., Wagner, G., Almeida, J.P.A. and Guizzardi, R.S., 2015. Towards ontological foundations for conceptual modeling: the unified foundational ontology (UFO) story. Applied ontology, 10(3-4), pp.259-271.

Koschmider, A. and Reijers, H.A., 2015. Improving the process of process modelling by the use of domain process patterns. Enterprise Information Systems, 9(1), pp.29-57.

Bistarelli, S., Di Noia, T., Mongiello, M. and Nocera, F., 2017. PrOnto: An Ontology Driven Business Process Mining Tool. Procedia Computer Science, 112, pp.306-315.

Guizzardi, G., Guarino, N. and Almeida, J.P.A., 2016, September. Ontological considerations about the representation of events and endurants in business models. In International Conference on Business Process Management (pp. 20-36). Springer, Cham.