Ontology Construction - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 56

Chapter 4
Ontology Construction:
Representing Dietz “Process” and
“State” Models Using BPMN Diagrams
Carlos Páscoa
INOV - INESC Inovação, Portuga &Estado-Maior da Força Aérea, Portugal
Pedro Sousa
INOV - INESC Inovação, Portugal & Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
José Tribolet
INOV - INESC Inovação, Portuga & Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal
AbstrAct
Capturing knowledge has always been an objective although known to be costly and time consuming.
ontologies, being “an explicit specification of a conceptualization,” have tried to capture knowledge
within the aspects of concepts (used to represent a domain entity), relations (representing a interaction
between the domain concepts), functions (a special case of relations), axioms (which represent true
statements) and instances (used to represent domain elements). The Enterprise Ontology, which rep-
resents the work on ontologies applied to the enterprise, as proposed initially by Gruber, can be seen
as a collection of terms and definitions relevant to business enterprises that can be used as a basis for
decision making. A new concept of Enterprise Ontology proposed by Dietz is defined as the realization
and implementation essence of an enterprise proposing a distinction world ontology and system ontol-
ogy. The sequence of actions, according to Dietz can be classified as “datalogical”, “infological” and
“ontological” and all become under a Transaction Pattern which consists of four basic states: “request”,
“promise”, “state” and “accept”. Further more the author defines four models that can be used to verify
the consistency of the actions: “Process”, “Action”, “State” and “Construction” models. The traditional
way to model processes, like the BPMN, draw events, activities and data in a sequence of symbols that
may not represent completely all the actions in presence and, above all, does not detect and identify
consistency between actors and actions. However, BPMN diagrams can also be used to represent vari-
ous actions and models proposed by Dietz as the transaction, “Process” and “State” diagrams. Both
ways of representing have advantages and disadvantages and can be used, either isolated or together
to give a deep representation of reality.