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

10.3. LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE WORK 169
was chosen as the domain references for the annotation in the exemplar
studies. SCOR specifications have not been originally represented in OWL
ontologies. As the ontology engineering contributions, the SCOR ontologies
in OWL representations in this work can be reused in other applications.
– A prototype of the annotation tool. The development of the annotation tool
has provided the technical contribution to the system implementation by
integrating Semantic Web technology. Also the prototype serves as a testbed
in the evaluation of our approach .
– Quality evaluation and applicability validation. The quality evaluation has
presented how an evaluation procedure was conducted applying SEQUAL
[80]. Through the applicability validation, a possible process knowledge
management application has been demonstrated based on the annotation
results. The ways of applying the relevant Semantic Web technologies such
as DL reasoning and SWRL have also been presented in the application.
10.3 Limitations and Future Work
Semantic annotation enabling e-business and B2B is still an interesting topic in academic
and industrial research. On one hand, the needs of semantic annotation for reconciling
heterogeneous informations are obviously crucial for the cooperative business
nowadays. On the other hand, there exist few comprehensive academic or industrial
standards and mature off-the-shelf products for semantic annotation. Moreover, the
related methodology and technology such as development and application of ontologies
and Semantic Web, are still open issues for the ontology-based semantic annotation.
Some limitations of the work and possible extensions are discussed in this section.
• Further automatic enhancement is needed to facilitate the annotation procedure.
NLP techniques such as information extraction from model contents and AI
techniques like machine learning might be considered in the annotation of semistructured
information too. Furthermore, model abstraction mechanism can be
applied to categorize models.
• The work should be evaluated in various domains and applications. The approach
has been evaluated on two models for one business domain. The exemplars are
from literature sources, and the process models and domain ontologies are experimental
design. The usability and applicability should be further validated
through real cases studies.
• Evolution of ontologies and model changes have not been taken into account in
the annotation. This issue is associated with the flexibility of the approach. Since
no gold standard ontology is available and changes are impossible to avoid, the
ontology will certainly evolve with the evolution of the domain knowledge, and
process models might change too. When that happens, the annotation results
will be inconsistent with models and ontologies. It should be possible to provide
a mechanism to keep the annotation results for the unchanged parts of model and
to evolve the ontology references when the ontology is modified.