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A Core Ontology of Business Processes Based on DOLCE

  • Original Article
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Journal on Data Semantics

Abstract

New performance requirements to adapt to the changing environment and to maintain a competitive advantage have contributed since the 1980s to the emergence of new types of organizations focused on projects or processes. To facilitate the implementation of this process view of organizations, many theoreticians and practitioners have proposed analysis and modeling frameworks, ontologies being considered as a relevant tool to conduct a “semantic analysis” of business processes. Approaches in this area are, however, based on ad hoc, often implicit modeling principles and the proposed ontologies remain poor in terms of expressiveness. The objective of this paper is to analyze the ontological foundations of the business processes following a formal approach. We propose a core ontology of business processes specializing the DOLCE foundational ontology and supplementing Bottazzi and Ferrario’s DOLCE-based formal ontology of organizations. This ontology comprises several modules to reflect both the “static” aspects of organizations and their behaviors, including intentional ones. In the article, we present the contents of the ontology, the formal ontological tools reused for its design, and the various theories the ontology is committed to.

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Notes

  1. http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/old/DOLCE.html.

  2. With respect to our notation, the informal labels on DOLCE’s categories appear in the text in the Courier new font with First Capital Letters for the concepts and a javaLikeNotation for relations. The same conventions apply for all the ontologies presented in the article.

  3. In the current state of our ontology, the different concepts of intention introduced are defined without reference to their content (conceptual or not). The definition of these contents would require to dispose of an ontology of mental objects such as the one whose bases have been laid by Ferrario and Oltramari [25] as an extension of DOLCE.

  4. In DOLCE-Lite-Plus, a notion of action was informally introduced as “an Accomplishment exemplifying the intention of an agent” [12]. By more generally defining Actions as arbitrary Perdurants controlled by an Intention, as recently proposed by Trypuz [15] in an extension of DOLCE to actions, we allow other categories of Perdurants, namely States and Processes, to be intentionally realized.

  5. Though we use a Searlian terminology to designate this intention, the intended concept is somewhat different. Thus, based on Pacherie’s [26] dynamic theory of intentions, we consider that thePrior Intention does not stop at the point where the Action begins. On the contrary, the Prior Intention continues and plays a control role to guide the Action and determine its success.

  6. Examples of ‘aggregate collectivities’ cited by French are: one’s neighbors, teenage groups and mobs; Examples of ‘conglomerate collectivities’ are: clubs, political parties, universities, corporations, and armies.

  7. The complementarity of the objects and processes is explained by a strong mutual dependence, as reminded by Galton and Mizoguchi [16, p. 72]: “(a) matter and objects by nature presuppose the participation in processes or events, and (b) processes and events by nature presuppose the existence of matter or objects.” Usually applied to physical objects, our intention in this article is to extend the scope of this principle to social objects.

  8. Technically, two entities with exactly the same parts are considered identical. If individual members of an organization are identified to the parts of this organization, the identity of members should involve the identity of the organizations, which is obviously not the case.

  9. To keep the relationship isPartOf its homogeneous nature, we consider that an Organization may only have as parts sub- organizations, namely of Organization Units. Thus, the identity of the Organization Units leads to the identity of the Organizations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIRACL Laboratory, University of Sfax, ISIMS, B.P. 242, 3021, Sfax, Tunisia

    Mohamed Turki & Faïez Gargouri

  2. MIS Laboratory, University of Picardie Jules Verne, 33 rue Saint-Leu, Amiens cedex 1, 80039, France

    Mohamed Turki, Gilles Kassel & Inès Saad

  3. Amiens School of Management, 18 place Saint Michel, Amiens cedex 1, 80038, France

    Inès Saad

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  1. Mohamed Turki
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  2. Gilles Kassel
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  4. Faïez Gargouri
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Correspondence to Mohamed Turki.

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Turki, M., Kassel, G., Saad, I. et al. A Core Ontology of Business Processes Based on DOLCE. J Data Semant 5, 165–177 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13740-016-0067-2

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