Description
Various attempts have been undertaken to further automate the BPM lifecycle. One of the recent initiatives in this area is the Semantic Business Process Management approach as pursued within the SUPER project. It aims at bridging the gap between business and IT worlds by increasing the degree of automation within the BPM lifecycle using Semantic Web and Semantic Web services technologies.
Organization Structure Description for the
Needs of Semantic Business Process
Management
Witold Abramowicz
1
, Agata Filipowska
1
Monika Kaczmarek
1
, Carlos
Pedrinaci
2
, Monika Starzecka
1
, and Adam Walczak
1
1
Pozna´ n University of Economics, Department of Information Systems,
60-967 Pozna´ n, Poland,
{W.Abramowicz, A.Filipowska, M.Kaczmarek, M.Starzecka,
A.Walczak}@kie.ae.poznan.pl
WWW home page: http://kie.ae.poznan.pl
2
Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK,
[email protected]
WWW home page: http://kmi.open.ac.uk
Abstract. Various attempts have been undertaken to further automate
the BPM lifecycle. One of the recent initiatives in this area is the Se-
mantic Business Process Management approach as pursued within the
SUPER project. It aims at bridging the gap between business and IT
worlds by increasing the degree of automation within the BPM lifecycle
using Semantic Web and Semantic Web services technologies. In order
to ful?l the SBPM vision, enterprises as well as their environment need
to be properly described. The main contribution of this paper is a set of
ontologies for describing organizational structures and examples showing
how they may be combined with further organizational information, e.g.,
business functions and business roles, to support the automatic analysis
of business processes.
1 Introduction
A business process may be de?ned as a set of related, ordered activities that
contribute to the production of good(s) or the delivery of some service. It em-
phasises how the work is done within an organization and by its organization
members. Therefore, organizations have their own context for any running busi-
ness process even if they operate in the same domain. This context embraces
information like used resources, strategies, enterprise structure as well as roles
and functions. However, when modelling business processes using current stan-
dardized notations (e.g. BPMN) a lot of information, especially on organizational
aspects, cannot be represented.
Various attempts were undertaken to achieve automation of the BPM lifecy-
cle. One of the most advanced initiatives in this area is the concept of Semantic
Business Process Management developed within the SUPER project (Seman-
tic Utilised for Process Management with and between Enterprises). It aims at
bridging the gap between business and IT worlds by increasing the degree of
automation within the BPM lifecycle using Semantic Web and Semantic Web
services technologies.
In order to ful?l the SBPM vision, apart from the semantic description of the
process ?ow (control structure), the process content description is also required.
The process content relates to the enterprise and its environment and therefore,
must rely on a proper organization description. Furthermore, for these aspects
to take part in any automated processing they need to be expressed in a formal
and machine readable form. The goal of this paper is to present a set of ontolo-
gies that support capturing organisational information as required for realizing
the Semantic Business Process Management vision. We present four ontologies
supporting the semantic representation of a process content and position them
within the entire organizational framework developed within the SUPER project.
The overall approach we propose in based on the use of ontological descriptions
of process ?ow enriched with additional descriptions of the related resources, the
organisational entities involved, the roles required, etc as proposed earlier in [1].
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: ?rst, we discuss the scope
for the semantic description of an organization. Then, four ontologies, namely Or-
ganizational Structure Ontology, Organisational Units Ontology, Business Func-
tions Ontology and Business Roles Ontology are shortly described followed by
an example of process description with the use of developed ontologies. Finally,
we position our work within the state of the art in the area of semantic represen-
tation of an enterprise. Finally we present some conclusion and introduce lines
for future research.
2 Semantic Representation of Organization
In order to describe an organization for the needs of the Semantic Business Pro-
cess Management, an appropriate vocabulary needs to be provided. It should
allow for the description of both processes and process artefacts (process con-
tent). As mentioned, the volume of knowledge needed to adequately describe
all organizational details relevant to any given element of a business process
is immense. In order to represent this knowledge, relevant contextual informa-
tion need to be extracted as well as important elements and aspects need to be
identi?ed.
The main aspects that need to be captured are the process structure and
enterprise domain speci?c terms (see Figure 2). The process related vocabulary
is important to ensure a proper and unambiguous representation of control ?ow
of processes within and between enterprises, while the latter part of stack is to
provide a speci?c representation of a domain of given organization. Therefore,
the process-related information (i.e. process ontologies) describes the structure of
a process (i.e. tasks, control structures, links etc.), whereas organisation related
ontologies provide a description of enterprise artefacts (i.e. actors, functions etc.)
that are utilised or involved in the process realization. The domain ontologies
provide the additional information speci?c to an organization from a given do-
main. As already stated in the introduction, the focus of this paper is on the
organizational ontologies that provide a high-level view on the organization and
process-related space. Therefore, it is to provide vocabulary and constraints for
describing the environment in which processes are carried out from the organi-
zation’s perspective i.e. to allow describing actors, roles and other resources that
may be referred to in the process de?nitions [1].
Process Ontologies
O
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g
a
n
i
s
a
t
o
n
a
l
O
n
t
o
l
o
g
i
e
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D
o
m
a
i
n
O
n
t
o
l
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g
i
e
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Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Fig. 1. SBPM Ontology Stack
Within the SUPER project we identi?ed the following areas of the organisa-
tion description: business functions, business roles, organisational units, organ-
isational structure, process resources, enterprise strategy and modelling guide-
lines. Each area is addressed by the respective ontology. All ontologies form an
ontology stack for the needs of organizational aspects representation and usage
within the business process modelling phase. The approach applied in SUPER
was built based on previous achievements in the ?eld of organisation modelling
and was shaped by an extensive BPM practice while the preceding approaches in-
volved mainly traditional managerial concepts. Hence, the SUPER view is more
compact (e.g. it decomposes the institutional internal structure into functions
and roles) whereas it also seems to be less human-centred (comparing e.g. skills
and sta? elements to resources of a process). The important similarities embrace
the more general view on the organization; highlighting the elements that in?u-
ence the institutional environment (i.e. strategy and modelling guidelines) in a
comprehensive manner.
De?ning a fully comprehensive model of an enterprise, is a particularly chal-
lenging and demanding task which would require an extremely extensive and
complex conceptualisation which it would be di?cult to manage, adapt, and
extend. Therefore, we propose instead a modular ontology stack that provides
basic notions, systematizes them and thus provide the foundation for further
development able to address the needs of a particular enterprise.
Below a short description of ontologies constituting the SUPER organisa-
tional ontologies stack follows:
– Business Functions - providing vocabulary to describe the hierarchy of dif-
ferent functions that may be carried out within a company (e.g. marketing,
?nance, HR) in order to enable vendor and domain independent classi?ca-
tion of company processes and process fragments providing abstraction over
single tasks constituting processes.
– Business Roles - representing roles in the organisation e.g. Designer, Process
Modeller, IT Expert, CEO.
– Organizational Structure and Organisational Units Ontologies presenting de-
tailed view on the organisational structure of an entity being described.
– Process Resources - describing applications and resources that should be
spent when carrying out processes (e.g. documents, IT systems, or any other
resources needed to accomplish a task) or that may be a result of a certain
task in a process.
– Enterprise Strategy - in order to model information related to an enterprise
strategy, targeted markets, bene?ciaries of the company and some surround-
ings that in?uence the processes carried out in a company.
– Modelling Guidelines - used to describe policies and rules that should be
taken into account during processes modelling.
In the following sections, the Business Organizational Structure Ontologies as
well as the Functions and Business Roles Ontologies constituting a part of the
ontologies stack are presented. The ?nal shape (concepts and relations) of on-
tologies is a result of thorough analysis of the most representative ERP systems
together with the critical approach towards the related work described in sec-
tion 7. The expert knowledge was also an important source of inspiration. All
mentioned ontologies were modelled using the WSML formalism.
3 Organization structure ontology
The Organizational Structure Ontology (OSO) focuses on supporting the def-
inition of organisational structures. Following literature from this domain, the
organisational structure may be de?ned as a structure and/or hierarchy of an
organization and how its constituents work together to achieve common goals.
Therefore, an organizational structure encompasses: departments, employees,
their responsibilities, resources etc. as well as relations among them. The Organi-
zational Structure Ontology is designed as an upper level ontology and therefore
provides a main structure and relations aiming at achieving the domain inde-
pendency. OSO structure is a result of analysis and mixture of a few described in
a literature organisational structure models. The developed structure was based
and/or inspired by [2–7].
Figure 3 depicts the proposed structure of OSO. For readability purposes, all
designed relations, not just subsumption ones, are included in the ?gure.
Organisaton Legal Entty
Non-legal Entty
Role
Organisatonal
Positon
Organisatonal
Unit
Resource
Person
Business
Functon
has Sub-Unit
consists of
assigned to
Skills
consists of
is-a
is-a
is-a
is
-
a
plays
owns
owns / has access
owns / has access
p
e
rfo
rm
s
w
o
r
k
s
a
s
h
a
s
r
e
q
u
i
r
e
s
Fig. 2. Organizational Structure Ontology
The structure of the developed ontology makes it easy for other ontologies
created within SUPER to import OSO concepts and use them as super concepts
(e.g. Business Roles Ontology, Business Functions Ontology, Resource Ontol-
ogy, and ?nally Organizational Unit Ontology may import OSO). OSO links all
organizational ontologies developed so far in the SUPER project and enables
description of organizational structure.
The following concepts are included in the OSO ontology:
– Organization - a social arrangement which pursues collective goals, which
controls its own performance, and which has a boundary separating it from
its environment Legal Entity - an entity that can enter into a legal contract
[2].
– Non-legal Entity - an entity within a company with a role and business
function assigned. It is a coherent formation in a company structure, but has
no entitlement to act as an autonomous participant of economical processes
[2].
– Organizational Unit - “any recognized association of people in the context of
an enterprise. In a hierarchical structure, it may be a corporation, a division,
a department, a group or a team. In addition, it may be a committee, a task
force, a project management organization, a class (for education) and so on”
[4].
– Business Function - functional area of an enterprise such as Human Re-
sources, Sales Management, etc.
– Role - a common super type for elements that de?ne roles. It provides a
common root for roles in organizations as well as roles in processes. A role
de?nes a set of expected behaviours, prerogatives and obligations featured
by an actor [4].
– Person - a human being regarded as an individual; an employee.
– Skills - a capability having two following features: it refers to a potential
actor that is a person; the ability must be practiced or demonstrated to some
measurable degree (eg. driving license, ?uent German command, etc.)[2]
– Organisational position - de?nes the role of one or more people in an orga-
nization unit (eg. sales assistant, secretary) [4].
– Resource - an entity that can be used or consumed while carrying out some
activity or business process [2].
4 Organization units ontology
This ontology is designed to provide a common vocabulary for description of ”any
recognized association of people in the context of the enterprise. In a hierarchical
structure, it may be the corporation, a division, a department, a group or a
team. In addition, it may be a committee, a task force, a project management
organization, a class (for education) and so on”[4].
However, a variety of existing departments as well as naming standards,
forced us to make some simpli?cation. The developed ontology includes only the
most common organizational departments. We assumed that we are modelling
Organizational Units Ontology for a production enterprise (therefore, in order
to describe some highly speci?c organizational units of e.g. publishing house or
security company, appropriate concepts should be de?ned). The Figure 4 depicts
the idea of OUO, whereby the arrows in the ?gure represent the is-a relation.
As we decided to use Organizational Unit de?nition proposed by OMG in [4],
we divided all units into temporary and permanent ones. Temporary units are
entities, that are created in order to carry out a task, project etc. They exist
in an organizational structure as long as the task or project is carried out, and
disappear upon its completion. Permanent Units depicted in the ?gure above,
were chosen as a result of analysis of di?erent organizational structures of existing
companies and organizations available in the Internet and SAP Solution Maps.
Chosen units form a group that is common for many organizations being also
domain-independent.
5 Business Functions and Business Roles Ontology
Within this section we give a short overview of Business Functions and Business
Roles Ontology.
Organisatonal Unit
Temporary
Organisatonal Unit
Permanent Organisatonal
Unit
Project Unit
Team / Task Unit
Commitee Unit
FinanceDept.
HR Dept.
Management Dept.
Marketng Dept.
Sales Dept.
Producton / Operatonal Dept.
Administraton Dept.
R&D Dept.
Customer Service Dept.
Logistcs Dept.
Procurement Dept.
Facilites / Inventory Dept.
Internatonal A?airs
Dept.
Public Relatons Dep.
Fig. 3. Organizational Units Ontology
For a more comprehensive description please refer to [8]. The purpose of the
Business Functions Ontology (BFO) is to provide foundation for structuring and
de?ning business functions. As a business function, we understand the functional
area of an enterprise such as Human Resources Management, Sales Management,
etc. [8]. The BFO concept hierarchy consists of two parallel structures: one for
function structure description and the other to group concepts representing ac-
tivities connected or being part of a given functional area. The function sub-tree
re?ects main functional areas of the company e.g. Sales and Management. The
ontology allows organizing knowledge on functions performed in the enterprise
and explains what type of tasks are parts of those functions. BFO allows also
decomposing business functions into smaller units (sub-functions).
In the functional approach, the structure of the business organization is being
(partially) expressed with the functions carried out by an abstract entity (a
group, an agent or a department). BFO has been created in order to provide
a skeleton of business functions that would be common for every enterprise,
regardless of the domain the enterprise operates in. The BFO ontology is a
complete construction, nonetheless it is supposed to be a comprehensive - yet
generic - starting point for further development. Therefore, BFO includes only
the high level view on the functional side of an enterprise that should be extended
by domain-speci?c ontologies.
In turn, the BRO ontology introduces the vocabulary needed to describe roles
of both internal and external actors as performers of process’ tasks. Therefore,
the purpose of the Business Roles Ontology (BRO) is to specify the common
meaning of concepts related to roles acquired and played by actors within the
organizational microenvironment. We de?ne a BusinessRole as a set of expected
behaviours, prerogatives and obligations featured by an actor. Any actor may
play more than one role and these roles may change depending on the situa-
tion (context). Three main elements of the BRO knowledge model encompass:
InternalRole, ExternalRole and InternalRoleType concepts. Although BRO is a
generic, top-level ontology, it aims at the ful?lment of the mentioned constraints
and provides a minimal, yet comprehensive, set of concepts. By a microenvi-
ronment we mean both the inside structure of an organization or an enterprise
and its close surroundings. The ontology is designed in a way that supports its
further development and extensions.
6 Example
This section presents a simple business process described using organizational
ontologies. We decided to keep the example very simple to assure clarity intelli-
gibility of presented idea.
The process was modelled using Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN)
serialised to sBPMN (ontological version of the BPMN speci?cation developed
within the SUPER project [9].
The example presents an internal process of ordering printing paper in the
Human Resources Department. It includes the following steps:
1. An employee goes to an o?ce assistant and informs her about the shortage
of printing paper.
2. The o?ce assistant contacts a warehouse manager and places the appropriate
order.
3. The warehouse manager makes the reservation for the paper in the system.
4. The delivery man delivers the paper to the o?ce.
To describe the process, respective elements of the company must be de-
scribed. This includes the description of the actors involved (i.e. o?ce assistant,
warehouse manager and delivery man), the functions performed by them as
well as organisational units implicated. Let’s name the o?ce assistant MrsA.
She works on position of an o?ce manager. As an o?ce manager, her roles in
the company are: managing human resources and managing o?ce. The follow-
ing listing presents de?nition of appropriate instances of ontology concepts in
WSML.
i nst ance Managi ngOf f i ceRol e member Of br o#Or gani zat i onal AndAdmi ni st er i ngRol e
i nst ance HumanResour cesManagi ngRol e member Of br o#HRMRol e
i nst ance Of f i ceManager member Of oso#Or gani zot i onal Posi t i on
pl aysRol e hasVal ue {HumanResour cesManagi ngRol e, Managi ngOf f i ceRol e}
assi gnedTo hasVal ue {ouo#HRDepar t ment }
i nst ance Mr sA member Of oso#Per son
wor ksAs hasVal ue {Of f i ceManager }
MrB works as a warehouse manager in the Inventory Department, thus his only
role in the company is managing the warehouse.
i nst ance Managi ngWar ehouseRol e member Of br o#Resour ceAdmi ni st er i ngRol e
i nst ance War ehouseManager member Of oso#Or gani zat i onal Posi t i on
pl aysRol e hasVal ue {Managi ngWar ehouseRol e}
assi gnedTo hasVal ue {ouo#I nvent or yDepar t ment }
i nst ance Mr B member Of oso#Per son
wor ksAs hasVal ue {War ehauseManager }
MrC works as a delivery man in the Logistics Department, his role is distributing
supplies.
i nst ance Suppl yDi st r i but i ngRol e member Of br o#Suppl ement al Rol e
i nst ance Del i ver yMan member Of oso#Or gani zat i onal Posi t i on
pl aysRol e hasVal ue {Suppl yDi st r i but i ngRol e}
assi gnedTo hasVal ue {ouo#Logi st i csDepar t ment }
i nst ance Mr C member Of oso#Per son
wor ksAs hasVal ue {Del i ver yMan}
Finally, the process of processing the order for supporting commodity needs to
be created.
i nst ance Suppor t i ngCommodi t ySuppl yOr der Pr ocesi ng member Of sbpmn#Pr ocess
i sEncl osedI nBusi nessFunct i on hasVal ue bf o#Suppl yOr der Pr ocessi ng
In Figure 6 our exemplary process is presented. As comments, fragments of
WSML code showing the use of OSO, OUO, BRO and BFO ontologies are in-
cluded. Such a semantic annotation of the presented process allows for catego-
rization of the process model (and its fragments) as well as a clear and informed
assignment of roles/tasks/responsibilities. Moreover, as the entire process con-
tent is described in the machine accessible manner, the automatic processing and
reasoning is possible. Therefore, employing appropriate algorithms developed
within the SUPER project e.g. translation from the BPMN to BPEL process
representation is possible. Moreover, business analysts are provided with new
facilities for querying the process space may this be pre or post-execution. It is
also possible to reason on who is responsible for what, who is doing what, what
are the roles/functions associated with speci?c tasks. In addition, it is possible
to answer questions such as i) which organizational units are responsible for car-
rying out given functions; ii) which organizational units are participating in a
given process; and iii) which processes will be a?ected by changes in business
process given (and how these changes will in?uence people, resources, etc.)?
Answers to such exemplary questions may be of great importance in various
situations. Such information is needed whenever the organizational structure of
an enterprise is being managed and amended e.g., when the top management re-
Paper delivery Paper reservaton Not?caton of demand
i nst ance Paper Reser vat i on member Of sbpmn#Manual Task
. . .
hasPer f or mer hasVal ue Mr B
. . .
i nst ance Paper Del i ver y member Of sbpmn#Manual Task
. . .
hasPer f or mer hasVal ue Mr C
. . .
i nst ance Not i f i cat i onOf Demand member Of sbpmn#Manual Task
. . .
hasPer f or mer hasVal ue Mr sA
. . .
Fig. 4. Exemplary business process
structures the functional areas of the enterprise by outsourcing certain functions.
Enhancing business process models with semantic descriptions enables reasoning
on the process execution results, the main functionalities o?ered, process cate-
gorization, organizational units committed etc. Furthermore, a clear represen-
tation of the departments and/or employees interactions and their commitment
in enacted processes allows for constant monitoring of their workload. Such an
approach can noticeably improve the quality of business process management
in the company. In case of BRO the sociological side of business organization is
the clue to understand the potential use of this model. Normally, the sociological
knowledge (meaning the behaviour, expectations, obligations, common interests,
agent grouping con?gurations) is an ordinary and widespread knowledge when
it comes to human beings. Yet, because of lack of experience and very impaired
possibilities of real-life interactions, in case of automated information processing
and machine reasoning there is a strong need of modelling such knowledge explic-
itly. Without it, no mechanism should be expected to know what is a customer,
how a supervisor di?ers from any other employee or what does a stakeholder
concept stand for in the context of a given organization.
7 Related Work
Within this section a short overview of the related work is provided. A detailed
survey of research done in the ?eld of formal enterprise and organization de-
scription may be found in[8].
In 1982 William E. McCarthy modelled the REA (Resource-Event-Actor)
ontology [10, 11] containing only the concepts of resources, events and agents.
The REA enterprise ontology is based on elements of the early REA model.
Consequently theoretical background of REA comes from the ?eld of microeco-
nomics. All REA concepts and de?nitions are applied to the collaborative space
between enterprises where market exchange occurs among two or more trading
partners [12]. It is considered one of the most promising business domain ontolo-
gies, but lack of formal representation makes it useless for practice. Additionally,
it is criticized for inconsistent and confusing terminology for constructs [13], and
lack of clarity [14].
As a result of works conducted in the TOVE project [15] set of integrated
ontologies for modelling enterprises was developed. The goal was to create shared
representation of an enterprise, de?nition of the semantics and symbols which
depict de?ned concepts. Four Business Ontologies (Organization, Product and
Requirements, ISO9000 Quality, Activity-based Costing) and two Foundational
Ontologies (Activity, Resource) were developed. Although the proposed solution
is one of the most interesting and advanced in the area, the scope covered by
the ontologies and their granularity is still insu?cient for the needs of business
process description.
The e3-value ontology provides modelling constructs for representing and
analyzing a network of enterprises exchanging items of economic value with each
other [16]. The e3-value ontology was introduced as a tool to help explaining the
concepts used to represent e-commerce ideas. For some more advanced aspects of
organizations, such as strategic motivation that stem from environmental forces
or factors in the environment that in?uence the constellation other extensions
like e3forces, e3competences were developed. For the needs of business process
description the level of detail proposed in e3-value ontologies is to general. It
focuses on network of enterprises while our analysis is on the level of departments,
roles, and business functions.
Business Process Management Ontology, described in [17], allows a business
analyst to de?ne private business processes, public business processes (a.k.a.
business collaborations), business entities, business objects, services that im-
plement process activities and follow the UN/CEFACT Modelling Methodol-
ogy (UMM) for business process and information modelling. For the need of
business process descriptions the authors use the following constructs: business
entity, task and implementation. Organization structure aspect was neglected.
Although the authors emphasize that for practical usage proper instances of the
constructs must be created, we ?nd the ontology is too coarse-grained to be
suitable for our purposes.
A novel approach is presented in [18]. To provide further ?exibility within
the enterprise ontology the author suggests a contextual approach to ontology
development. A context involves seven domains: purpose, actor, action, object,
facility, location, and time. Created context-based enterprise ontology provides
a uni?ed view of an enterprise as an aggregation of contexts. This ontology can
be specialized into task ontologies or domain ontologies to meet particular needs
of enterprises, and still maintain connections of the specialized things to their
contexts. From the methodological point of view this approach is the closest to
our vision, and was an inspiration while designing the ontology stack for semantic
description of business processes.
As far as the organizational structure is concerned interesting models were
described in [2–4]. Each of them represents more or less the same level of detail,
the main di?erence being the described relations and the scope of the models.
The resulting structure of OSO ontology presented in this paper is a based on
the analysis and combination of solutions taken from each of them.
The abovementioned initiatives provided an inspiration and foundation for
developing the organizational ontologies. The structure of REA and Context-
Based Enterprise Ontology are probably closest to our vision, yet they do not
separate vocabulary from business process structure, which has been one of our
main goals.
8 Conclusion
This paper deals with the semantic annotation of business processes in the con-
text of the so-called Semantic Business Process Management approach. In par-
ticular, it focuses on the Organizational Structure Ontology divided into upper
level organizational structure ontology and organizational units ontology. Addi-
tionally, two other ontologies, Business Functions Ontology and Business Roles
Ontology are shortly discussed in order to show how the organizational struc-
ture ontology ?ts into the stack of organizational ontologies. The structure of the
ontologies is inspired by the earlier work in the ?eld, and extended in order to
support the level of automation pursued. The solution proposed in this article is
more comprehensive, provides extended ?exibility when describing processes as
well as adjusting the ontologies to the needs of the speci?c enterprise. Moreover,
it is compatible with the recent emerging standards of the Semantic Web.
We do not foresee any major constraints in the use of the presented models.
The separation of concepts used for more advanced description of organization
into subontologies is a proper solution for achieving the desired power of ex-
pressiveness. Nonetheless, the proposed ontologies should be further validated
and possibly extended in order to meet the real-life challenges including more
detailed levels of information . In this respect, future work will be devoted to
the extension of the ontologies and their integration with other models focussed
on supporting Business Process Analysis [19].
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doc_973505152.pdf
Various attempts have been undertaken to further automate the BPM lifecycle. One of the recent initiatives in this area is the Semantic Business Process Management approach as pursued within the SUPER project. It aims at bridging the gap between business and IT worlds by increasing the degree of automation within the BPM lifecycle using Semantic Web and Semantic Web services technologies.
Organization Structure Description for the
Needs of Semantic Business Process
Management
Witold Abramowicz
1
, Agata Filipowska
1
Monika Kaczmarek
1
, Carlos
Pedrinaci
2
, Monika Starzecka
1
, and Adam Walczak
1
1
Pozna´ n University of Economics, Department of Information Systems,
60-967 Pozna´ n, Poland,
{W.Abramowicz, A.Filipowska, M.Kaczmarek, M.Starzecka,
A.Walczak}@kie.ae.poznan.pl
WWW home page: http://kie.ae.poznan.pl
2
Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK,
[email protected]
WWW home page: http://kmi.open.ac.uk
Abstract. Various attempts have been undertaken to further automate
the BPM lifecycle. One of the recent initiatives in this area is the Se-
mantic Business Process Management approach as pursued within the
SUPER project. It aims at bridging the gap between business and IT
worlds by increasing the degree of automation within the BPM lifecycle
using Semantic Web and Semantic Web services technologies. In order
to ful?l the SBPM vision, enterprises as well as their environment need
to be properly described. The main contribution of this paper is a set of
ontologies for describing organizational structures and examples showing
how they may be combined with further organizational information, e.g.,
business functions and business roles, to support the automatic analysis
of business processes.
1 Introduction
A business process may be de?ned as a set of related, ordered activities that
contribute to the production of good(s) or the delivery of some service. It em-
phasises how the work is done within an organization and by its organization
members. Therefore, organizations have their own context for any running busi-
ness process even if they operate in the same domain. This context embraces
information like used resources, strategies, enterprise structure as well as roles
and functions. However, when modelling business processes using current stan-
dardized notations (e.g. BPMN) a lot of information, especially on organizational
aspects, cannot be represented.
Various attempts were undertaken to achieve automation of the BPM lifecy-
cle. One of the most advanced initiatives in this area is the concept of Semantic
Business Process Management developed within the SUPER project (Seman-
tic Utilised for Process Management with and between Enterprises). It aims at
bridging the gap between business and IT worlds by increasing the degree of
automation within the BPM lifecycle using Semantic Web and Semantic Web
services technologies.
In order to ful?l the SBPM vision, apart from the semantic description of the
process ?ow (control structure), the process content description is also required.
The process content relates to the enterprise and its environment and therefore,
must rely on a proper organization description. Furthermore, for these aspects
to take part in any automated processing they need to be expressed in a formal
and machine readable form. The goal of this paper is to present a set of ontolo-
gies that support capturing organisational information as required for realizing
the Semantic Business Process Management vision. We present four ontologies
supporting the semantic representation of a process content and position them
within the entire organizational framework developed within the SUPER project.
The overall approach we propose in based on the use of ontological descriptions
of process ?ow enriched with additional descriptions of the related resources, the
organisational entities involved, the roles required, etc as proposed earlier in [1].
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: ?rst, we discuss the scope
for the semantic description of an organization. Then, four ontologies, namely Or-
ganizational Structure Ontology, Organisational Units Ontology, Business Func-
tions Ontology and Business Roles Ontology are shortly described followed by
an example of process description with the use of developed ontologies. Finally,
we position our work within the state of the art in the area of semantic represen-
tation of an enterprise. Finally we present some conclusion and introduce lines
for future research.
2 Semantic Representation of Organization
In order to describe an organization for the needs of the Semantic Business Pro-
cess Management, an appropriate vocabulary needs to be provided. It should
allow for the description of both processes and process artefacts (process con-
tent). As mentioned, the volume of knowledge needed to adequately describe
all organizational details relevant to any given element of a business process
is immense. In order to represent this knowledge, relevant contextual informa-
tion need to be extracted as well as important elements and aspects need to be
identi?ed.
The main aspects that need to be captured are the process structure and
enterprise domain speci?c terms (see Figure 2). The process related vocabulary
is important to ensure a proper and unambiguous representation of control ?ow
of processes within and between enterprises, while the latter part of stack is to
provide a speci?c representation of a domain of given organization. Therefore,
the process-related information (i.e. process ontologies) describes the structure of
a process (i.e. tasks, control structures, links etc.), whereas organisation related
ontologies provide a description of enterprise artefacts (i.e. actors, functions etc.)
that are utilised or involved in the process realization. The domain ontologies
provide the additional information speci?c to an organization from a given do-
main. As already stated in the introduction, the focus of this paper is on the
organizational ontologies that provide a high-level view on the organization and
process-related space. Therefore, it is to provide vocabulary and constraints for
describing the environment in which processes are carried out from the organi-
zation’s perspective i.e. to allow describing actors, roles and other resources that
may be referred to in the process de?nitions [1].
Process Ontologies
O
r
g
a
n
i
s
a
t
o
n
a
l
O
n
t
o
l
o
g
i
e
s
D
o
m
a
i
n
O
n
t
o
l
o
g
i
e
s
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Fig. 1. SBPM Ontology Stack
Within the SUPER project we identi?ed the following areas of the organisa-
tion description: business functions, business roles, organisational units, organ-
isational structure, process resources, enterprise strategy and modelling guide-
lines. Each area is addressed by the respective ontology. All ontologies form an
ontology stack for the needs of organizational aspects representation and usage
within the business process modelling phase. The approach applied in SUPER
was built based on previous achievements in the ?eld of organisation modelling
and was shaped by an extensive BPM practice while the preceding approaches in-
volved mainly traditional managerial concepts. Hence, the SUPER view is more
compact (e.g. it decomposes the institutional internal structure into functions
and roles) whereas it also seems to be less human-centred (comparing e.g. skills
and sta? elements to resources of a process). The important similarities embrace
the more general view on the organization; highlighting the elements that in?u-
ence the institutional environment (i.e. strategy and modelling guidelines) in a
comprehensive manner.
De?ning a fully comprehensive model of an enterprise, is a particularly chal-
lenging and demanding task which would require an extremely extensive and
complex conceptualisation which it would be di?cult to manage, adapt, and
extend. Therefore, we propose instead a modular ontology stack that provides
basic notions, systematizes them and thus provide the foundation for further
development able to address the needs of a particular enterprise.
Below a short description of ontologies constituting the SUPER organisa-
tional ontologies stack follows:
– Business Functions - providing vocabulary to describe the hierarchy of dif-
ferent functions that may be carried out within a company (e.g. marketing,
?nance, HR) in order to enable vendor and domain independent classi?ca-
tion of company processes and process fragments providing abstraction over
single tasks constituting processes.
– Business Roles - representing roles in the organisation e.g. Designer, Process
Modeller, IT Expert, CEO.
– Organizational Structure and Organisational Units Ontologies presenting de-
tailed view on the organisational structure of an entity being described.
– Process Resources - describing applications and resources that should be
spent when carrying out processes (e.g. documents, IT systems, or any other
resources needed to accomplish a task) or that may be a result of a certain
task in a process.
– Enterprise Strategy - in order to model information related to an enterprise
strategy, targeted markets, bene?ciaries of the company and some surround-
ings that in?uence the processes carried out in a company.
– Modelling Guidelines - used to describe policies and rules that should be
taken into account during processes modelling.
In the following sections, the Business Organizational Structure Ontologies as
well as the Functions and Business Roles Ontologies constituting a part of the
ontologies stack are presented. The ?nal shape (concepts and relations) of on-
tologies is a result of thorough analysis of the most representative ERP systems
together with the critical approach towards the related work described in sec-
tion 7. The expert knowledge was also an important source of inspiration. All
mentioned ontologies were modelled using the WSML formalism.
3 Organization structure ontology
The Organizational Structure Ontology (OSO) focuses on supporting the def-
inition of organisational structures. Following literature from this domain, the
organisational structure may be de?ned as a structure and/or hierarchy of an
organization and how its constituents work together to achieve common goals.
Therefore, an organizational structure encompasses: departments, employees,
their responsibilities, resources etc. as well as relations among them. The Organi-
zational Structure Ontology is designed as an upper level ontology and therefore
provides a main structure and relations aiming at achieving the domain inde-
pendency. OSO structure is a result of analysis and mixture of a few described in
a literature organisational structure models. The developed structure was based
and/or inspired by [2–7].
Figure 3 depicts the proposed structure of OSO. For readability purposes, all
designed relations, not just subsumption ones, are included in the ?gure.
Organisaton Legal Entty
Non-legal Entty
Role
Organisatonal
Positon
Organisatonal
Unit
Resource
Person
Business
Functon
has Sub-Unit
consists of
assigned to
Skills
consists of
is-a
is-a
is-a
is
-
a
plays
owns
owns / has access
owns / has access
p
e
rfo
rm
s
w
o
r
k
s
a
s
h
a
s
r
e
q
u
i
r
e
s
Fig. 2. Organizational Structure Ontology
The structure of the developed ontology makes it easy for other ontologies
created within SUPER to import OSO concepts and use them as super concepts
(e.g. Business Roles Ontology, Business Functions Ontology, Resource Ontol-
ogy, and ?nally Organizational Unit Ontology may import OSO). OSO links all
organizational ontologies developed so far in the SUPER project and enables
description of organizational structure.
The following concepts are included in the OSO ontology:
– Organization - a social arrangement which pursues collective goals, which
controls its own performance, and which has a boundary separating it from
its environment Legal Entity - an entity that can enter into a legal contract
[2].
– Non-legal Entity - an entity within a company with a role and business
function assigned. It is a coherent formation in a company structure, but has
no entitlement to act as an autonomous participant of economical processes
[2].
– Organizational Unit - “any recognized association of people in the context of
an enterprise. In a hierarchical structure, it may be a corporation, a division,
a department, a group or a team. In addition, it may be a committee, a task
force, a project management organization, a class (for education) and so on”
[4].
– Business Function - functional area of an enterprise such as Human Re-
sources, Sales Management, etc.
– Role - a common super type for elements that de?ne roles. It provides a
common root for roles in organizations as well as roles in processes. A role
de?nes a set of expected behaviours, prerogatives and obligations featured
by an actor [4].
– Person - a human being regarded as an individual; an employee.
– Skills - a capability having two following features: it refers to a potential
actor that is a person; the ability must be practiced or demonstrated to some
measurable degree (eg. driving license, ?uent German command, etc.)[2]
– Organisational position - de?nes the role of one or more people in an orga-
nization unit (eg. sales assistant, secretary) [4].
– Resource - an entity that can be used or consumed while carrying out some
activity or business process [2].
4 Organization units ontology
This ontology is designed to provide a common vocabulary for description of ”any
recognized association of people in the context of the enterprise. In a hierarchical
structure, it may be the corporation, a division, a department, a group or a
team. In addition, it may be a committee, a task force, a project management
organization, a class (for education) and so on”[4].
However, a variety of existing departments as well as naming standards,
forced us to make some simpli?cation. The developed ontology includes only the
most common organizational departments. We assumed that we are modelling
Organizational Units Ontology for a production enterprise (therefore, in order
to describe some highly speci?c organizational units of e.g. publishing house or
security company, appropriate concepts should be de?ned). The Figure 4 depicts
the idea of OUO, whereby the arrows in the ?gure represent the is-a relation.
As we decided to use Organizational Unit de?nition proposed by OMG in [4],
we divided all units into temporary and permanent ones. Temporary units are
entities, that are created in order to carry out a task, project etc. They exist
in an organizational structure as long as the task or project is carried out, and
disappear upon its completion. Permanent Units depicted in the ?gure above,
were chosen as a result of analysis of di?erent organizational structures of existing
companies and organizations available in the Internet and SAP Solution Maps.
Chosen units form a group that is common for many organizations being also
domain-independent.
5 Business Functions and Business Roles Ontology
Within this section we give a short overview of Business Functions and Business
Roles Ontology.
Organisatonal Unit
Temporary
Organisatonal Unit
Permanent Organisatonal
Unit
Project Unit
Team / Task Unit
Commitee Unit
FinanceDept.
HR Dept.
Management Dept.
Marketng Dept.
Sales Dept.
Producton / Operatonal Dept.
Administraton Dept.
R&D Dept.
Customer Service Dept.
Logistcs Dept.
Procurement Dept.
Facilites / Inventory Dept.
Internatonal A?airs
Dept.
Public Relatons Dep.
Fig. 3. Organizational Units Ontology
For a more comprehensive description please refer to [8]. The purpose of the
Business Functions Ontology (BFO) is to provide foundation for structuring and
de?ning business functions. As a business function, we understand the functional
area of an enterprise such as Human Resources Management, Sales Management,
etc. [8]. The BFO concept hierarchy consists of two parallel structures: one for
function structure description and the other to group concepts representing ac-
tivities connected or being part of a given functional area. The function sub-tree
re?ects main functional areas of the company e.g. Sales and Management. The
ontology allows organizing knowledge on functions performed in the enterprise
and explains what type of tasks are parts of those functions. BFO allows also
decomposing business functions into smaller units (sub-functions).
In the functional approach, the structure of the business organization is being
(partially) expressed with the functions carried out by an abstract entity (a
group, an agent or a department). BFO has been created in order to provide
a skeleton of business functions that would be common for every enterprise,
regardless of the domain the enterprise operates in. The BFO ontology is a
complete construction, nonetheless it is supposed to be a comprehensive - yet
generic - starting point for further development. Therefore, BFO includes only
the high level view on the functional side of an enterprise that should be extended
by domain-speci?c ontologies.
In turn, the BRO ontology introduces the vocabulary needed to describe roles
of both internal and external actors as performers of process’ tasks. Therefore,
the purpose of the Business Roles Ontology (BRO) is to specify the common
meaning of concepts related to roles acquired and played by actors within the
organizational microenvironment. We de?ne a BusinessRole as a set of expected
behaviours, prerogatives and obligations featured by an actor. Any actor may
play more than one role and these roles may change depending on the situa-
tion (context). Three main elements of the BRO knowledge model encompass:
InternalRole, ExternalRole and InternalRoleType concepts. Although BRO is a
generic, top-level ontology, it aims at the ful?lment of the mentioned constraints
and provides a minimal, yet comprehensive, set of concepts. By a microenvi-
ronment we mean both the inside structure of an organization or an enterprise
and its close surroundings. The ontology is designed in a way that supports its
further development and extensions.
6 Example
This section presents a simple business process described using organizational
ontologies. We decided to keep the example very simple to assure clarity intelli-
gibility of presented idea.
The process was modelled using Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN)
serialised to sBPMN (ontological version of the BPMN speci?cation developed
within the SUPER project [9].
The example presents an internal process of ordering printing paper in the
Human Resources Department. It includes the following steps:
1. An employee goes to an o?ce assistant and informs her about the shortage
of printing paper.
2. The o?ce assistant contacts a warehouse manager and places the appropriate
order.
3. The warehouse manager makes the reservation for the paper in the system.
4. The delivery man delivers the paper to the o?ce.
To describe the process, respective elements of the company must be de-
scribed. This includes the description of the actors involved (i.e. o?ce assistant,
warehouse manager and delivery man), the functions performed by them as
well as organisational units implicated. Let’s name the o?ce assistant MrsA.
She works on position of an o?ce manager. As an o?ce manager, her roles in
the company are: managing human resources and managing o?ce. The follow-
ing listing presents de?nition of appropriate instances of ontology concepts in
WSML.
i nst ance Managi ngOf f i ceRol e member Of br o#Or gani zat i onal AndAdmi ni st er i ngRol e
i nst ance HumanResour cesManagi ngRol e member Of br o#HRMRol e
i nst ance Of f i ceManager member Of oso#Or gani zot i onal Posi t i on
pl aysRol e hasVal ue {HumanResour cesManagi ngRol e, Managi ngOf f i ceRol e}
assi gnedTo hasVal ue {ouo#HRDepar t ment }
i nst ance Mr sA member Of oso#Per son
wor ksAs hasVal ue {Of f i ceManager }
MrB works as a warehouse manager in the Inventory Department, thus his only
role in the company is managing the warehouse.
i nst ance Managi ngWar ehouseRol e member Of br o#Resour ceAdmi ni st er i ngRol e
i nst ance War ehouseManager member Of oso#Or gani zat i onal Posi t i on
pl aysRol e hasVal ue {Managi ngWar ehouseRol e}
assi gnedTo hasVal ue {ouo#I nvent or yDepar t ment }
i nst ance Mr B member Of oso#Per son
wor ksAs hasVal ue {War ehauseManager }
MrC works as a delivery man in the Logistics Department, his role is distributing
supplies.
i nst ance Suppl yDi st r i but i ngRol e member Of br o#Suppl ement al Rol e
i nst ance Del i ver yMan member Of oso#Or gani zat i onal Posi t i on
pl aysRol e hasVal ue {Suppl yDi st r i but i ngRol e}
assi gnedTo hasVal ue {ouo#Logi st i csDepar t ment }
i nst ance Mr C member Of oso#Per son
wor ksAs hasVal ue {Del i ver yMan}
Finally, the process of processing the order for supporting commodity needs to
be created.
i nst ance Suppor t i ngCommodi t ySuppl yOr der Pr ocesi ng member Of sbpmn#Pr ocess
i sEncl osedI nBusi nessFunct i on hasVal ue bf o#Suppl yOr der Pr ocessi ng
In Figure 6 our exemplary process is presented. As comments, fragments of
WSML code showing the use of OSO, OUO, BRO and BFO ontologies are in-
cluded. Such a semantic annotation of the presented process allows for catego-
rization of the process model (and its fragments) as well as a clear and informed
assignment of roles/tasks/responsibilities. Moreover, as the entire process con-
tent is described in the machine accessible manner, the automatic processing and
reasoning is possible. Therefore, employing appropriate algorithms developed
within the SUPER project e.g. translation from the BPMN to BPEL process
representation is possible. Moreover, business analysts are provided with new
facilities for querying the process space may this be pre or post-execution. It is
also possible to reason on who is responsible for what, who is doing what, what
are the roles/functions associated with speci?c tasks. In addition, it is possible
to answer questions such as i) which organizational units are responsible for car-
rying out given functions; ii) which organizational units are participating in a
given process; and iii) which processes will be a?ected by changes in business
process given (and how these changes will in?uence people, resources, etc.)?
Answers to such exemplary questions may be of great importance in various
situations. Such information is needed whenever the organizational structure of
an enterprise is being managed and amended e.g., when the top management re-
Paper delivery Paper reservaton Not?caton of demand
i nst ance Paper Reser vat i on member Of sbpmn#Manual Task
. . .
hasPer f or mer hasVal ue Mr B
. . .
i nst ance Paper Del i ver y member Of sbpmn#Manual Task
. . .
hasPer f or mer hasVal ue Mr C
. . .
i nst ance Not i f i cat i onOf Demand member Of sbpmn#Manual Task
. . .
hasPer f or mer hasVal ue Mr sA
. . .
Fig. 4. Exemplary business process
structures the functional areas of the enterprise by outsourcing certain functions.
Enhancing business process models with semantic descriptions enables reasoning
on the process execution results, the main functionalities o?ered, process cate-
gorization, organizational units committed etc. Furthermore, a clear represen-
tation of the departments and/or employees interactions and their commitment
in enacted processes allows for constant monitoring of their workload. Such an
approach can noticeably improve the quality of business process management
in the company. In case of BRO the sociological side of business organization is
the clue to understand the potential use of this model. Normally, the sociological
knowledge (meaning the behaviour, expectations, obligations, common interests,
agent grouping con?gurations) is an ordinary and widespread knowledge when
it comes to human beings. Yet, because of lack of experience and very impaired
possibilities of real-life interactions, in case of automated information processing
and machine reasoning there is a strong need of modelling such knowledge explic-
itly. Without it, no mechanism should be expected to know what is a customer,
how a supervisor di?ers from any other employee or what does a stakeholder
concept stand for in the context of a given organization.
7 Related Work
Within this section a short overview of the related work is provided. A detailed
survey of research done in the ?eld of formal enterprise and organization de-
scription may be found in[8].
In 1982 William E. McCarthy modelled the REA (Resource-Event-Actor)
ontology [10, 11] containing only the concepts of resources, events and agents.
The REA enterprise ontology is based on elements of the early REA model.
Consequently theoretical background of REA comes from the ?eld of microeco-
nomics. All REA concepts and de?nitions are applied to the collaborative space
between enterprises where market exchange occurs among two or more trading
partners [12]. It is considered one of the most promising business domain ontolo-
gies, but lack of formal representation makes it useless for practice. Additionally,
it is criticized for inconsistent and confusing terminology for constructs [13], and
lack of clarity [14].
As a result of works conducted in the TOVE project [15] set of integrated
ontologies for modelling enterprises was developed. The goal was to create shared
representation of an enterprise, de?nition of the semantics and symbols which
depict de?ned concepts. Four Business Ontologies (Organization, Product and
Requirements, ISO9000 Quality, Activity-based Costing) and two Foundational
Ontologies (Activity, Resource) were developed. Although the proposed solution
is one of the most interesting and advanced in the area, the scope covered by
the ontologies and their granularity is still insu?cient for the needs of business
process description.
The e3-value ontology provides modelling constructs for representing and
analyzing a network of enterprises exchanging items of economic value with each
other [16]. The e3-value ontology was introduced as a tool to help explaining the
concepts used to represent e-commerce ideas. For some more advanced aspects of
organizations, such as strategic motivation that stem from environmental forces
or factors in the environment that in?uence the constellation other extensions
like e3forces, e3competences were developed. For the needs of business process
description the level of detail proposed in e3-value ontologies is to general. It
focuses on network of enterprises while our analysis is on the level of departments,
roles, and business functions.
Business Process Management Ontology, described in [17], allows a business
analyst to de?ne private business processes, public business processes (a.k.a.
business collaborations), business entities, business objects, services that im-
plement process activities and follow the UN/CEFACT Modelling Methodol-
ogy (UMM) for business process and information modelling. For the need of
business process descriptions the authors use the following constructs: business
entity, task and implementation. Organization structure aspect was neglected.
Although the authors emphasize that for practical usage proper instances of the
constructs must be created, we ?nd the ontology is too coarse-grained to be
suitable for our purposes.
A novel approach is presented in [18]. To provide further ?exibility within
the enterprise ontology the author suggests a contextual approach to ontology
development. A context involves seven domains: purpose, actor, action, object,
facility, location, and time. Created context-based enterprise ontology provides
a uni?ed view of an enterprise as an aggregation of contexts. This ontology can
be specialized into task ontologies or domain ontologies to meet particular needs
of enterprises, and still maintain connections of the specialized things to their
contexts. From the methodological point of view this approach is the closest to
our vision, and was an inspiration while designing the ontology stack for semantic
description of business processes.
As far as the organizational structure is concerned interesting models were
described in [2–4]. Each of them represents more or less the same level of detail,
the main di?erence being the described relations and the scope of the models.
The resulting structure of OSO ontology presented in this paper is a based on
the analysis and combination of solutions taken from each of them.
The abovementioned initiatives provided an inspiration and foundation for
developing the organizational ontologies. The structure of REA and Context-
Based Enterprise Ontology are probably closest to our vision, yet they do not
separate vocabulary from business process structure, which has been one of our
main goals.
8 Conclusion
This paper deals with the semantic annotation of business processes in the con-
text of the so-called Semantic Business Process Management approach. In par-
ticular, it focuses on the Organizational Structure Ontology divided into upper
level organizational structure ontology and organizational units ontology. Addi-
tionally, two other ontologies, Business Functions Ontology and Business Roles
Ontology are shortly discussed in order to show how the organizational struc-
ture ontology ?ts into the stack of organizational ontologies. The structure of the
ontologies is inspired by the earlier work in the ?eld, and extended in order to
support the level of automation pursued. The solution proposed in this article is
more comprehensive, provides extended ?exibility when describing processes as
well as adjusting the ontologies to the needs of the speci?c enterprise. Moreover,
it is compatible with the recent emerging standards of the Semantic Web.
We do not foresee any major constraints in the use of the presented models.
The separation of concepts used for more advanced description of organization
into subontologies is a proper solution for achieving the desired power of ex-
pressiveness. Nonetheless, the proposed ontologies should be further validated
and possibly extended in order to meet the real-life challenges including more
detailed levels of information . In this respect, future work will be devoted to
the extension of the ontologies and their integration with other models focussed
on supporting Business Process Analysis [19].
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