1. Business process ontology
Amina ANNANE, Nathalie AUSSENAC, Mouna Kamel

2. AVIREX Project
The goal of AVIREX project is to design and implement a virtual assistant that will:
Monitor operators in the execution of business processes step-by-step
Answer the different questions that an operator may ask about the process execution
Keep the context of anomalies that occur during process execution
Eventually, if the operator succeeds in resolving the problem, save the solution to be reused when the same problem occurs.
next step?
Show me the user guide of the tool X?
Recall me the expected value?

3. A Knowledge base for the virtual assistant
Business process ontology
Feedback experience ontology
TBox
Business processes
Business process executions
Feedback experiences
ABox

4. AVIREX project: IRIT expected contributions
Developing the TBox ontologies:
business process ontology
feedback experience ontology
Designing an automatic (or semi-automatic) approach to instantiate the Business process ontology from textual documents describing business processes

5. Business process ontology (BBO)

6. Outline Ontology development steps: Conclusion Open issues
Specification
Conceptualization
Formalization and Implementation
Evaluation
Conclusion
Open issues

7. Ontology specification
Knowledge sources:
A corpus of 20 technical documents describing business processes of our industrial collaborators.
A set of 21 competency questions collected from experts and literature [10, 11]
Examples:
Fragment of a real industrial business process
Which resources are required for a given activity ?
What are the sub-activities of a given activity ?
Which activities must precede a given activity?
Where the activity should be performed?
…………

8. Ontology specification
The business process ontology should cover the following:
Activity decomposition and sequencing
Activity inputs/outputs
Agents
Activity location

9. Conceptualization: existing models and ontologies
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN 2.0) [1]
A Core Ontology for Business pRocess Analysis (COBRA) [2]
The Entreprise ontology [3]
A formal ontology for industrial maintenance [4]
An Ontology For The Management Of Software Maintenance Projects [5]
A model-driven ontology approach for manufacturing system interoperability and knowledge sharing [7]
……..

10. Conceptualization: existing models and ontologies
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN 2.0) [1]
A Core Ontology for Business pRocess Analysis (COBRA) [2]
The Entreprise ontology [3]
A formal ontology for industrial maintenance [4]
An Ontology For The Management Of Software Maintenance Projects [5]
A model-driven ontology approach for manufacturing system interoperability and knowledge sharing [7]
……..

11. Why BPMN meta-model?
A fine grained representation of business processes
A standard for business process representation: ISO/IEC 19510:2013
Widely adopted by companies => An active community
A well defined execution logic of its elements which facilitates the automation of business processes

12. Conceptualization: UML class diagrams

13. Conceptualization: Activity decomposition

14. Conceptualization: Input/output specifications

15. Conceptualization: Resource taxonomy [4]

16. Formalization and Implementation
We have formalized and implemented BBO in OWL with Protégé tool using a set of rules:
UML classes are converted into OWL classes
UML relations are converted into OWL object properties
…..
We have formalized specifications in natural language
Ex:
Specification in natural language
Formalized specification
A StartEvent MUST be a source for a SequenceFlow. p.245
StartEvent rdfs:subClassOf (has_outgoing some SequenceFlow)

17. Evaluation: Quantitative evaluation
Ontology statistics
Two schema metrics [9] :
Relationship Diversity (RD) = 𝑅𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝𝑁𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑅𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝𝑁𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟+𝑖𝑠−𝑎𝑁𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟
Schema Deepness (SD)= 𝑖𝑠−𝑎𝑁𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑝𝑡𝑁𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟
Concept number
Relationship number
is-a number
158
145
135 RD SD
0.52
0.85

18. Evaluation: Qualitative evaluation
We have represented two business processes of our corpus (randomly chosen) using BBO
We have verified the possibility of expressing the 21 competency questions in SPARQL queries with BBO
Example: What is the next task?
………………………………..
Send the command CGHFR
Wait 45 seconds
Verify and note the value of the telemetry TM_MM (-0.5V, +0.8V)
………………………………..
…………………………….
Repeat the operations 41 to 44, 9 times following the instructions on the packing station.
………………….
Fragment from a Thalès business process
Fragment from a Continental business process
Select ?A ?nextA where{ ?A a BBO:Task.
?nextA a BBO:Task.
?A BBO:has_nextFlowNode ?nextA.}

19. Conclusion
BBO: a novel ontology for representing business processes based on BPMN
Up to now, partial evaluation showed that BBO:
Is not just a taxonomy
Is a deep ontology
Offers a fine grained representation of business processes and allows to express competency questions in formal queries.
An advanced evaluation requires the instantiation of more business processes.

20. Open issues How to instantiate BBO from textual documents?
Recognize tools, parameters, expected values, etc.
Decompose complex instructions into atomic ones
Identify task preconditions
Determine the sequencing constraints between tasks (ex: sequential or parallel)
Implicit knowledge ….
Small-size and Domain specific corpus with technical terms > Poor performance of NLP parsers
Open world reasoning/closed world reasoning
SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language) shapes to validate instances
………………………………..
Send the command CGHFR
Wait 45 seconds
Verify and note the value of the telemetry TM_MM (-0.5V, +0.8V)

21. Bibliography
[1] BPMN 2.0 specification [2] Uschold, M. et al. (1998) ‘The Enterprise Ontology’, The Knowledge Engineering Review, 13(1), pp. 31–89. [3] Pedrinaci, C. et al. (2008) ‘A core ontology for business process analysis Conference Item’, in 5th European Semantic Web Conference, {ESWC}, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, pp. 49–64. [4] KARRAY M. H., CHEBEL-MORELLOB. & ZERHOUNIN. (2012). A formal ontology for industrial maintenance. Applied ontology,7(3), 269–310. [5] RUÍZF., VIZCAINOA., PIATTINIM. & GARCÍAF. (2004). An Ontology For The Management Of Software Maintenance Projects. International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 14(3), 1–27. [6] FALBOR. D. A. & BERTOLLOG. (2009). A software process ontology as a common vocabulary about software processes.International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management,4(4), 239–250. [7] CHUNGOORA N., YOUNGR. I. M., GUNENDRANG., PALMERC., USMANZ., ANJUMN. A.,CUTTING-DECELLEA.-F., HARDINGJ. A. & CASEK. (2013). A model-driven ontology approach for manufacturing system interoperability and knowledge sharing. Computers in Industry,64(4), 392–401. [8] J. Zhao, W.M. Cheung, R.I.M. Young, (1999) "A consistent manufacturing data model to support virtual enterprises", International Journal of Agile Management Systems, Vol. 1 Issue: 3, pp [9] Tartir, S. and Arpinar, I. B. (2007) ‘Ontology evaluation and ranking using OntoQA’, in 1st International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC). California, USA, pp. 185–192. [10] Abdalla, A. et al. (2014) ‘An Ontology Design Pattern for Activity Reasoning’, in 5th Workshop on Ontology and Semantic Web Patterns (WOP2014). Riva del Garda, Italy, pp [11] Falbo, R. D. A. and Bertollo, G. (2009) ‘A software process ontology as a common vocabulary about software processes’, International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 4(4), pp