Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Use of Ontologies as Representation Support of Workflows Oriented to Administrative Management

  • Published:
Journal of Network and Systems Management Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

One of the applications of workflow systems is the management of administrative processes characterized by the transmission of information elements among users of an organization. Tasks contained in these processes are carried out by users responsible for confirming, modifying or adding information throughout. These processes need to be defined in workflow management systems in which all the elements are perfectly identified and are easily adaptable to changes that may arise in the sequences of tasks, in the users involved or in the data transmitted from one task to another. For this kind of processes is easier to reuse those represented in ontologies. On one hand, existing ontologies for representing some domain elements can be reused. At the same time, ontologies have an excellent expressive capacity to define tasks, their relationships and the flow control among them with precision. This paper proposes a complete model, together with the necessary software tools, for tackling this issue.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. http://www.wfmc.org.

  2. http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/.

  3. http://protege.stanford.edu/.

  4. http://www.itil-officialsite.com/.

  5. http://quercusseg.unex.es/ontoquercus/?download=OntoWorkflow.owl.

  6. http://quercusseg.unex.es/ontoquercus/?download=OntoTIC_Demo.owl.

  7. http://quercusseg.unex.es/ontoquercus/?download=OntoTIC_ITIL_Demo.owl.

  8. http://jena.sourceforge.net/.

  9. http://www.mpgex.es.

References

  1. Workflow Management Coalition: Workflow management coalition terminology & glossary. Document No. WFMC-TC-1011,. 3rd ed, WfMC, Winchester (1999)

  2. van der Aalst, W., van Hee, K.: Workflow management - models, methods and systems, 1st edn. Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing/MIT Press, Cambridge, MA/London (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Gartner Group: Business process and business intelligence: The 2005 Focus. Delivering IT’s contribution: the 2005 CIO agenda. Gartner, Inc., Stamford, Section 3, pp. 40–51 (2005)

  4. McCready, S.: There is more than one kind of workflow software, Computerworld, November 2 (1992)

  5. Georgakopoulos, D., Hornick, M.F., Sheth, A.P.: An overview of workflow management: from process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure. Distrib Parallel Databases 3(2), 119–153 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Weske, M.: Business process management: concepts, languages, architectures. Springer, New York (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Vieira, T. A. S. C., Casanova, M. A., Ferrao, L. G.: An ontology-driven architecture for flexible workflow execution. In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference 10th Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web & 2nd Latin American Web Congress, IEEE Computer Society, Ribeirao Preto-SP, Brazil, pp. 70–77 (2004)

  8. Pathak, J., Caragea, D., Honavar, V.:Ontology-extended component-based workflows: a framework for constructing complex workflows from semantically heterogeneous software components. In: Proceedings of the SWDB Semantic Web and Databases, Second International Workshop, Springer, Toronto, Canada, pp. 41–56 (2004)

  9. Zdravkovic, J., Kabilan, V.: Enabling business process interoperability using contract workflow models. In: On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2005: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE, OTM Confederated International Conferences CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE 2005 Proceedings, Part I, Springer, Agia Napa, Cyprus, pp. 77–93 (2005)

  10. Gasevic, D., Devedzic, V.: Petri net ontology. Knowl.-Based Syst. 19(4), 220–234 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Haller, A., Oren, E., Kotinurmi, P.: m3po: an ontology to relate choreography models to workflow models. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Services Computing, IEEE Computer Society, Chicago, Illinois (2006)

  12. Vidal, J. C., Lama, M., Bugarín, A.: A workflow modeling framework enhanced with problem-solving knowledge, In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Knowledge-based intelligent information and engineering systems, Springer, Bournemouth, UK, pp. 623–632 (2006)

  13. Yao, Z., Liu, S., Han, L., Reddy, Y. V. R., Yu, J., Liu, Y., Zhang, C., Zheng, Z.: An ontology based workflow centric collaboration system. In: Proceedings of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design III, 10th International Conference, CSCWD 2006, Springer, Nanjing, China, pp. 689–698 (2007)

  14. Abramowicz, W., Filipowska, A., Kaczmarek, M., Kaczmarek, T.: Semantically enhanced business process modelling notation.In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Business Process and Product Lifecycle Management (SBPM-2007), CEUR-WS, Innsbruck, Austria, pp. 88–91 (2007)

  15. OMG: Business process modeling notation (BPMN), Version 1.0. OMG Final Adopted Specification, OMG, Needham (2006)

  16. Andonoff, E., Bouaziz, W., Hanachi, C.: A protocol ontology for inter-organizational workflow coordination. In: Proceedings of the 11th East-European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS), Springer, Varna, Bulgaria, pp. 28–40 (2007)

  17. Davies, J., van Harmelen, F., Fensel, D.: Towards the semantic web: ontology-driven knowledge management. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York (2002)

  18. Gruber, T. R.: Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing, Technical report KSL 93-04, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, (1993)

  19. Dou, D., LePendu, P.: Ontology-based integration for relational databases. In: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, ACM, Dijon, France, pp. 461–466 (2006)

  20. Grüninger, M., Atefi, K., Fox, M.S.: Ontologies to support process integration in enterprise engineering. Comput. Math. Organ. Theory 6(4), 381–394 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. BEA, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Siebel: Business Process Execution Language for Web Services Version 1.1 (2003)

  22. WfMC: Workflow Standard, Process Definition Interface – XML Process Definition Language, Technical Report Document Number WFMC-TC-1025, Workflow Management Coalition, Winchester (2005)

  23. van der Aalst, W., ter Hofstede, A.: YAWL: yet another workflow language. Inf. Syst. 30, 245–275 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Business Process Management Initiative: Business process modeling language. Specification Version 1.0, BPMI.org, Needham, (2002)

  25. Lozano-Tello, A., Gómez-Pérez, A.: Applying the ONTOMETRIC method to measure the suitability of ontologies. In: Green, P., Rosemann, M. (eds.) Business Systems Analysis with Ontologies, pp. 249–269. Idea Group Publising, Hershey, Chapter IX. (2005)

  26. Gomez-Perez, A., Corcho, O., Fernandez-Lopez, M.: Ontological engineering: with examples from the areas of knowledge management, e-commerce and the semantic web, 2nd edn. Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing Series/Springer, New York (2007)

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work has been developed under support of Junta de Extremadura Project (PDT08A023) and Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion Project (TIN2008-02985). We thank Javier Prieto of MPG Extremadura for his collaboration in the design and implementation of methods and tools.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Systems and Telematics Engineering Department, University of Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

    Álvaro E. Prieto & Adolfo Lozano-Tello

  2. Escuela Politécnica de Cáceres, Avda de la Universidad sn, 10071, Cáceres, Spain

    Álvaro E. Prieto

Authors
  1. Álvaro E. Prieto
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Adolfo Lozano-Tello
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Álvaro E. Prieto.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Prieto, Á.E., Lozano-Tello, A. Use of Ontologies as Representation Support of Workflows Oriented to Administrative Management. J Netw Syst Manage 17, 309–325 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-009-9132-6

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10922-009-9132-6

Keywords

Search

Navigation