Semantic Annotation for Process Models: - Department of Computer ...

166 CHAPTER 10. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
• RQ2. What kind of ontologies are required for process knowledge management
and how to represent them?
Ontologies can provides a standard and formal representation of a conceptualization,
which can be used for semantic reconciliation. Through the analysis of
semantic discrepancies at both levels, meta-model and model levels, we have determined
that a process modeling ontology is needed for the meta-model level and
a business domain ontology is necessary for the model level. A general process
ontology — GPO has been proposed and the concepts and their relationships
have been defined in a meta-model of process models in Chapter 4. A business
domain is determined by the use cases so that the domain ontology is driven
from the SCOR reference models. The ontological representations of SCOR have
been exemplified in Chapter 7. Besides, a goal ontology representing the process
objectives have been regarded as an additional requirement for managing process
knowledge. The goal ontology is associated with the contextual semantics of
process models, and moreover goal specifications can be used in the goal-driven
process knowledge management. A general goal ontology representation has been
defined in Chapter 5. In order to facilitate associating goals with processes, some
concepts in GPO are reused in the goal ontology representation. A specific goal
ontology is domain dependent and an example of the specific goal ontology of
SCOR domain has been used in exemplar studies in Chapter 7. All the ontologies
have been modeled in OWL with Protégé in order to make use of Semantic
Web technologies in applications.
• RQ3. What metadata are essential for process model interoperability and how are
they defined concerning reference ontologies for reconciliation of the heterogeneous
semantics of process models?
In Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, we have presented our semantic annotation framework,
consisting of profile annotation, meta-model annotation, model annotation
and goal annotation. The annotation metadata is also referred as annotation
schema in this thesis. A set of metadata including Dublin Core has been categorized
into the types of administrative, descriptive, preservation, technical and use
to describe the profile information of process models in Table 4.1. In the metamodel
annotation, different process modeling languages are mapped to GPO to
reconcile the different modeling constructs with the common definitions in GPO.
There are three cases of mapping: one-one, many-one and combination-one, which
need to be specified in the meta-model annotation schema. GPO is the basis of
the semantic annotation framework and it constructs the semantic annotation
model for model annotation and goal annotation after the meta-model annotation.
In the semantic annotation model, process knowledge in original models
is represented in a common knowledge representation format. Model annotation
is to refer model contents to domain ontology concepts. Simple reference
is not sufficient for specifying the semantic discrepancies. We refined the reference
through semantic relationships (such as synonym, polysemy, hypernym,
hyponym, meronym, holonym and instance) which are usually used in ontology
specifications, so that the model annotation looks like to build "intermediate ontologies"
between the domain ontology concepts and the local model contents.