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

40 CHAPTER 3. STATE OF THE ART
(Figure 3.1) are also applied to study the semantic representations of those process
ontologies.
3.2.1 BWW (Bunge-Wand-Weber) ontology
BWW (Bunge-Wand-Weber) ontological constructs provide a semantic basis of meta
models of conceptual models. The BWW ontology can be used as the top level ontology
because the BWW ontology is initially built as a set of core constructs that underlie
the computer science and information systems fields, especially for modeling tasks.
Although BWW ontology is not specially created as process ontology, it covers the
concepts which can be used for process modeling. BWW ontology consists of the
following major concepts, namely thing, property, state, law, event, transformation and
system. Those concepts are too abstract to specify semantics regarding the process
perspectives. Therefore, the BWW ontology is often used as a meta-meta-model and
specified further according to the modeling perspectives, e.g. the process perspectives.
The BWW ontology has been modeled in different languages, e.g. originally settheoretic
definition [204] (a formal representation), a list of textual descriptions [128] (an
informal representation), entity relationship model [158] (a semi-formal representation).
3.2.2 MIT process handbook
The MIT process handbook project has developed rich online libraries for sharing and
managing many kinds of knowledge about business. The essential activity of the MIT
process handbook is to organize process knowledge in libraries, which is related to
the process representation issue. Two sources of intellectual leverage are exploited
for the representation: (1) notions of specialization of processes based on the ideas
about inheritance from object-oriented programming, and (2) concepts about managing
dependencies from coordination theory [98]. Specialization includes part specialization
and type specialization. Dependencies are distinguished as flow dependencies, sharing
dependencies and fit dependencies.
The representation of a process in the MIT process handbook is modeled as different
types of entries of a given activity in the repository [99]:
• Description. Descriptions include any useful or interesting information to users
such as definitions, comments, figures, sources for further information, links to
other entries, or links to other Web pages.
• Parts. The point of view embodied in this entry is that these activities constitute
one possible representation of the ’deep structure’.
• Properties. Any other kind of information related to a given activity: the last
modification, time required to do the activity, cost of doing the activity, location
of the activity, and so on.
• Related Processes. An extensive network of relationships among different entries.
• Specializations. Specialization hierarchies listing a number of levels (e.g. 18 levels
in some cases) of increasingly specialized activities of the given activity.