Business process ontology

1. Business process ontology Amina ANNANE, Nathalie AUSSENAC, Mouna Kamel

2. AVIREX Project • The goal of AVIREX project is to design and implement a virtual assistant that will: • Monitor operators in the execution of business processes step-by-step • Answer the different questions that an operator may ask about the process execution • Keep the context of anomalies that occur during process execution • Eventually, if the operator succeeds in resolving the problem, save the solution to be reused when the same problem occurs. nextstep? Show me the user guide of the tool X? Recallme the expected value?

3. A Knowledge base for the virtual assistant Business process ontology Feedback experience ontology TBox • Business processes • Business process executions • Feedback experiences ABox

4. AVIREX project: IRIT expected contributions • Developing the TBoxontologies: • business process ontology • feedback experience ontology • Designing an automatic (or semi-automatic) approach to instantiate the Business process ontology from textual documents describing business processes

5. Business process ontology (BBO)

6. Outline • Ontology development steps: • Specification • Conceptualization • Formalization and Implementation • Evaluation • Conclusion • Open issues

7. Ontology specification • Knowledge sources: • A corpus of 20 technical documents describing business processes of our industrial collaborators. • A set of 21 competency questions collected from experts and literature [10, 11] • Examples: Fragment of a real industrial business process

8. Ontology specification • The business process ontology should cover the following: • Activity decomposition and sequencing • Activity inputs/outputs • Agents • Activity location

9. Conceptualization: existing models and ontologies • Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN 2.0) [1] • A Core Ontology for Business pRocess Analysis (COBRA) [2] • The Entreprise ontology [3] • A formalontology for industrialmaintenance [4] • An Ontology For The Management Of Software Maintenance Projects [5] • A model-drivenontologyapproach for manufacturing system interoperability and knowledgesharing [7] • ……..

10. Conceptualization: existing models and ontologies • Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN 2.0) [1] • A Core Ontology for Business pRocess Analysis (COBRA) [2] • The Entreprise ontology [3] • A formalontology for industrialmaintenance [4] • An Ontology For The Management Of Software Maintenance Projects [5] • A model-drivenontologyapproach for manufacturing system interoperability and knowledgesharing [7] • ……..

11. Why BPMN meta-model? • A fine grained representation of business processes • A standard for business process representation: ISO/IEC 19510:2013 • Widely adopted by companies => An active community • A well defined execution logic of its elements which facilitates the automation of business processes

12. Conceptualization: UML class diagrams

13. Conceptualization: Activity decomposition

14. Conceptualization: Input/output specifications

15. Conceptualization: Resource taxonomy [4]

16. Formalization and Implementation • We have formalized and implemented BBO in OWL with Protégé tool using a set of rules: • UML classes are converted into OWL classes • UML relations are converted into OWL object properties • ….. • We have formalized specifications in natural language • Ex:

17. Evaluation: Quantitative evaluation • Ontology statistics • Two schema metrics [9] : • Relationship Diversity (RD)

18. Evaluation: Qualitative evaluation • We have represented two business processes of our corpus (randomly chosen) using BBO • We have verified the possibility of expressing the 21 competency questions in SPARQL queries with BBO • Example: What is the next task? ……………………………….. ……………………………. Repeat the operations 41 to 44, 9 times following the instructions on the packing station. …………………. ……………………………….. Send the command CGHFR Wait 45 seconds Verify and note the value of the telemetry TM_MM (-0.5V, +0.8V) Fragment from a Continental business process Fragment from a Thalès business process Select ?A ?nextAwhere{ ?A aBBO:Task. ?nextA a BBO:Task. ?A BBO:has_nextFlowNode ?nextA.}

19. Conclusion • BBO: a novel ontology for representing business processes based on BPMN https://www.irit.fr/recherches/MELODI/ontologies/BBO • Up to now, partial evaluation showed that BBO: • Is not just a taxonomy • Is a deep ontology • Offers a fine grained representation of business processes and allows to express competency questions in formal queries. • An advanced evaluation requires the instantiation of more business processes.

20. Open issues • How to instantiate BBO from textual documents? • Recognize tools, parameters, expected values, etc. • Decompose complex instructions into atomic ones • Identify task preconditions • Determine the sequencing constraints between tasks (ex: sequential or parallel) • Implicit knowledge • …. • Small-size and Domain specific corpus with technical terms > Poor performance of NLP parsers • Open world reasoning/closed world reasoning • SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language) shapes to validate instances ……………………………….. Send the command CGHFR Wait 45 seconds Verify and note the value of the telemetry TM_MM (-0.5V, +0.8V)

21. Bibliography [1] BPMN 2.0 specificationhttps://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/PDF [2] Uschold, M. et al. (1998) ‘The Enterprise Ontology’, The Knowledge Engineering Review, 13(1), pp. 31–89. [3] Pedrinaci, C. et al. (2008) ‘A coreontology for business processanalysisConference Item’, in 5th EuropeanSemantic Web Conference, {ESWC}, Tenerife, CanaryIslands, Spain, pp. 49–64. [4] KARRAY M. H., CHEBEL-MORELLOB. & ZERHOUNIN. (2012). A formalontology for industrial maintenance. Applied ontology,7(3), 269–310. [5] RUÍZF., VIZCAINOA., PIATTINIM. & GARCÍAF. (2004). An Ontology For The Management Of Software Maintenance Projects. International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 14(3), 1–27. [6] FALBOR. D. A. & BERTOLLOG. (2009). A software process ontology as a common vocabulary about software processes.International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management,4(4), 239–250. [7] CHUNGOORA N., YOUNGR. I. M., GUNENDRANG., PALMERC., USMANZ., ANJUMN. A.,CUTTING-DECELLEA.-F., HARDINGJ. A. & CASEK. (2013). A model-drivenontologyapproach for manufacturing system interoperability and knowledge sharing. Computers in Industry,64(4), 392–401. [8] J. Zhao, W.M. Cheung, R.I.M. Young, (1999) "A consistent manufacturing data model to support virtualenterprises", International Journal of Agile Management Systems, Vol. 1 Issue: 3, pp.150-158. [9] Tartir, S. and Arpinar, I. B. (2007) ‘Ontologyevaluation and rankingusingOntoQA’, in 1st International Conference on SemanticComputing (ICSC). California, USA, pp. 185–192. [10] Abdalla, A. et al. (2014) ‘An Ontology Design Pattern for Activity Reasoning’, in 5th Workshop on Ontology and Semantic Web Patterns (WOP2014). Riva del Garda, Italy, pp. 78--81. [11] Falbo, R. D. A. and Bertollo, G. (2009) ‘A software process ontology as a common vocabulary about software processes’, International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 4(4), pp. 239--250.