Ontology Construction - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 57

introduction a set of four models, with their exclusive way of

representation, “Process”, “Action”, “State” and
“Construction” are defined by the author, who ten
demonstrates using the Volley example.
Although is seems that the Transaction Pat-
tern is a convenient and universal method to state
identifying the four models could be represented
in a existing language, like the BPMN.
Using the Portuguese Air Force Mission Re-
quest Process, more complex than the Volley, the
authors intend to assert that Dietz's Transaction
Pattern also applies and demonstrate that two
models, “Process” and “State”, can be represented
using BPMN.
Speaking of the Enterprise Ontology implies
revisiting the concept of ontologies, in paragraph
“ONTOLOGIES”, and the particular case of the
Enterprise Ontology (paragraph “ENTERPRISE
ONTOLOGY”). Paragraph “DIETZ ENTER-
PRISE ONTOLOGY” introduces Dietz Enterprise
Ontology and presents the concepts behind: the
Transaction Pattern and the “Process”, “Action”,
“State” and “Construction” models applied to
the Volley case study. Paragraph “THE POR-
TUGUESE AIR FORCE MISSION REQUEST
PROCESS” discusses the Mission Request Pro-
cess and the application of the Transaction Pat-
tern in its analysis and its “Process” and “State”
representation using BPMN.

Ontologies have been used to capture knowledge
and representing domains of interest. Since the
first works, around 1990, ontologies have evolved
significantly and they are used, in the present time,
within a broader scope.
As the first ontologies consisted of practical
examples defining syntax and semantics about a
domain, today they have many formal definitions,
each having advantages and disadvantages, and
can define concepts, relations, functions, axioms
or instances of the domain elements.
The Enterprise Ontology is a collection of terms
and definitions relevant to business enterprises
modeling and provides a formal way to define a
particular domain: the enterprise trying to scope
together some of the key organizational elements
like goals, work processes, authority, positions
and communication. More recently, some authors
proposed a framework for modeling organizations.
Thus, the Enterprise Ontology presents several
sections: Meta Ontology and Time, Activity, Plan,
Capability, and Resource, Organization, Strategy
and Marketing and associated concepts and rela-
tions between them. The TOVE model considers
an organization to be a set of constraints on the
activities performed by agents and has the objec-
tives to produce and develop the organizational
object taxonomy.
Although ontologies serve several purposes
they do not identify lack of coherence between
actions of a domain.
Dietz Enterprise Ontology, objectively pro-
poses a methodology and a set of models to repre-
sent and analyze consistency of actions in a given
process, while identifying three types of human
abilities: “performa” (performer acts), “informa”
(expressing acts) and “forma” (datalogical acts).
Dietz Transaction Pattern defines four states:
“request”, “promise”, “state” and “accept”. The
existence of the four states should be considered
as a universal need for every transaction. Further
more, to detail exhaustively the several actions

bAckground

Capturing knowledge has always been an objective
although known to be costly and time consum-
ing (Neches et al., 1991). Additionally, acquiring
and representing the knowledge in a successful
way, for a particular domain, does not mean that
the captured knowledge can be reused in a new
system (Swartout et al., 1994).
The work on the ontologies field goes back to
the beginning of 1990. From those early years,
ontology-building methodologies have evolved,
and several have been proposed in order to achieve