A procedural model for ontological analyses - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 162

Figure 13.2. An extension of ontological analysis through the use of focused
ontologies.

Indeed, the outcomes of the ontological analyses of different modelling grammars to
date appear to support the need for a focused ontology, which consists of different
subsets of the ontological constructs for different domains. The analyses of the examined
grammars consistently show that the constructs conceivable state space, conceivable event
space and lawful event space , for example,have no representative constructs in the
grammars. Such missing constructs, if identified as unnecessary for the particular domain,
can be ignored, leading to a simpler analysis that does not consider phenomena that are
deemed to be outside of the scope of the target grammar.

Summary and future work
There has been a marked increase in the application of ontologies for the purposes of
analysing modelling grammars. For example, a literature review identified more than
25 papers that applied the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology for the analysis of modelling
grammars such as ER (e.g. Wand and Weber, 1989; Wand and Weber, 1993; Wand and
Weber, 1995), OMT, UML (e.g. Burton-Jones and Meso, 2002; Opdahl and Henderson-
Sellers, 2002; Shanks et al., 2002), Petri-Nets, ARIS (e.g. Green and Rosemann, 2000;
Green and Rosemann, 2002; Rosemann and Green, 2002) and Web Services standards
such as ebXML, BPEL4WS, BPML or WSCI (e.g. van der Aalst et al., 2002; Wohed et
al., 2002; Green et al., 2003). In general, selected ontologies and their interpretations,
from an information systems viewpoint, are reasonably advanced. However, the actual
process of conducting an ontological analysis is still rather immature. At this stage, the
process is focused on the identification of the cardinality of the relationships between
corresponding elements in the ontology and the modelling grammar under analysis. In
our analysis, eight shortcomings of the current ontological analysis process have been
identified and categorised into issues related to the input, process and output of the
analysis.
This paper has proposed to further enhance the current process of ontological analysis.
The objectives of such a method are:
1.

to provide guidance for researchers who are interested in conducting ontological
analyses;

2. to add rigour to the entire process and reduce the dependence on subjective inter-

pretations of the involved researchers, and

3. to increase the credibility of the ontological analysis and its results.