Reusing Ontological Knowledge about Business Processes in IS Engineering: Process Configuration Problem

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Ciuksys, Donatas | Caplinskas, Albertas

Affiliations: Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Vilnius University, Naugarduko 24, LT-03225 Vilnius, Lithuania, e-mail: donatas.ciuksys@mif.vu.lt | Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, A. Goštauto 12, LT-01108 Vilnius, Lithuania, e-mail: alcapl@ktl.mii.lt

Abstract: Business process engineering is an important part of the advanced enterprise engineering. One of the still open issues is the question how in the enterprise system design to reuse ontological knowledge about business processes. The paper proposes to consider a family of similar business processes as a generic process and to represent knowledge about generic processes in a domain independent way. It describes the main scheme for reuse of such a domain independent knowledge when developing enterprise-wide information systems (IS). The main attention is paid to the process configuration problem. In order to solve this problem, a configurator (human being or machine) must find a set of components that fit together to satisfy the problem specification. An approach based on Description Logics is proposed for this aim. The main contribution of the paper is the proposed process configuration technique.

Keywords: business process, knowledge reuse, ontology, description logics

Journal: Informatica, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 585-602, 2007