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

1.6. MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS 9
1.6 Major Contributions
Following the above research method and steps, the research has been deployed and it
has resulted in the following major contributions of this thesis:
1. A General Process Ontology (GPO) is the result of our investigation and analysis
of process ontologies and business process modeling languages, which is an effort
towards the unified process ontology for the interoperability of process models.
2. A basic semantic annotation framework is proposed to enrich semantics of process
models for process knowledge management.
3. An ontology-based annotation method including a semantic annotation model and
rules are elaborated to guide users to apply the framework for the annotation.
4. The extended semantic annotation framework is a goal annotation method with
a goal ontology representation and semi-automatic goal annotation algorithms.
5. A prototype of the annotation tool applying the Semantic Web technology is
implemented following the proposed framework and method.
6. A process knowledge management system integrating the semantic annotation approach
is outlined to validate the applicability of the framework and the method.
1.7 Thesis Outline
In this introduction chapter, we has explained the motivation of the work, described
the problems, listed the objectives of this work, provided an overview of the approach,
and presented the research method and our major contributions. The rest of the thesis
is organized following the research phases described in the research method in section
1.5. Chapter 2 and 3 provide a background, context and relevant work survey for
this research. Chapter 4 and 5 present our theoretical and methodology contributions,
while chapter 6 describes the implementational contributions of the work. Exemplar
studies are deployed to demonstrate the proposed approach in chapter 7. Chapter 8
evaluates the quality of the method, and Chapter 9 validates the applicability of the
work. Finally, conclusions and further work are discussed in chapter 10.
Chapter 2 - Problem Settings provides basic concepts, theory and technology about
information modeling, business process modeling, semantic interoperability, Semantic
Web and process knowledge management. Those issues compose the context of this
research work.
Chapter 3 - State of the Art discusses a number of existing business process modeling
languages and process ontologies to investigate modeling constructs and ontological
concepts corresponding to process modeling perspectives. The survey of semantic
annotation methods and tools shows most of work has been done on the semantic annotations
of unstructural and structural information, e.g. Web pages or Web services.
Comprehensive approaches for the semantic annotation of semi-structured information,
e.g. business process models, from meta-model and model levels are also demanded and
some efforts have been launched.