The importance of managing organizational knowledge of enterprises has been recognized for decades. The systematic development and reuse of organizational knowledge is expected to improve the competitiveness of the enterprise. While the practice of reuse is common in general computer science there is still a lack of surveys in regard to reuse in enterprise modeling. This document reviews four different papers presented at information systems conferences over the last seven years: CAISE, EMMSAD, ICIS, and INCOM. Our analysis indicates that the majority of research is realized by case studies, theoretical frameworks and mostly on business process modeling aspects of enterprise models.
Variability in complex systems offering rich set of features is a seriouschallenge to their users in term of flexibility with many possible variants fordifferent application contexts and maintainability. During the long period oftime, much effort has been made to deal with these issues. An effort in thisregard is developing and implementing different variability modelingtechniques.This thesis argues the explanation of three modeling techniques namedconfigurable components, feature models and function-means trees. The maincontribution to the research includes:• A comparison of above mentioned variability modeling techniques in asystematic way,• An attempt to find the integration possibilities of these modelingtechniques based on literature review, case studies, comparison,discussions, and brainstorming.The comparison is based on three case studies each of which is implemented inall above mentioned three modeling techniques and a set of generic aspects ofthese techniques which are further divided into characteristics. At the end, acomprehensive discussion on the comparison is presented and in final sectionsome integration possibility are proposed on the basis of case studies,characteristics, commonalities and experience gained through theimplementation of case studies and literature review.
Research projects have an inherent risk of failure, and learning howto cope with the risk is an important task for everyone involved. In order to doso it is necessary to share the knowledge of the experiences done during andafter the project. This paper investigates a recently completed enterprisemodeling research project and contributes with lessons learned andrecommendations for future enterprise modeling projects.
A clear understanding of the organizational competences of anenterprise and the underlying individual competences and the competencedevelopment needs has become more and more important for many industrialareas as a foundation for competence supply processes and adjustment tochanging market conditions. Competence modelling, i.e. the use of enterprisemodelling techniques for capturing existing and describing desiredorganisational and individual competences in enterprises, offers importantcontributions to this. In the last years, the authors of the paper have performed anumber of competence modelling cases, which revealed different characteristicsand resulted in lessons learned. This paper presents an examination of differentcharacteristics of competence modelling cases, and recommendations andlessons learned from these cases for the practice of competence modelling.
Abstract
In the current arena, rapid changes are required to address dynamic patient’s treatment process needs according to the patient’s demand in the healthcare sector. This research work addresses existing problems about information flow in ward-round, what is the optimal information need for an individual with his/her competences according to their role during ward-round in healthcare area. This work also mentions what are the certain activities which are required during the patient treatment.
This research work contributes in the field of Information logistics and ontology development in healthcare. So the main purpose of this thesis is to design an ontology based model that can fix information flow problems in the ward-round process of hospital unit. The ontology based model can be used to provide relevant information to the domain users according to their needs and demands. The ontology based model projects domain users profiling and describes their roles, information demands with competencies: skills, qualifications and experiences. The ontology based model will be implemented in OWL language that can be used in an application to support ward-round activities for achieving effective patient’s treatment process.
For ontology development is concerned, different ontology development methodologies have been reviewed from literature review by the author to analyze the existing problems in the ward-round. This thesis incorporates Hybrid Methodology (HM) that helps to develop ontology based model that addresses information flow problems in ward-round. The proposed ontology based model is developed in web Ontology Language (OWL) supported tool protégé 4.0.2 that can be considered as foundation to develop a software product with the help of IT practitioners and developers to fulfill medical practitioner’s demands in ward-round’s context.
Everyone is talking about the software development methods but these methods are categorised into the different parts and the most important are two categories, one is agile software development methods and second is using the traditional software development methods. Agile software methods are relatively considered to be quick and for the small teams. Our main mission is to check which method is better from each other, so for that purpose we go out in the software development market to meet the professional to ask about their satisfaction on these software development methods. Our research is based on to see the suitable method for the professionals; see the challenges on the adoptability of methods and which method is quicker. To perform this study we have gone through a survey questionnaire, and results are analysed by using mixed method approach. Results shows that professionals from both types of methods are satisfied but professionals with traditional methods are more satisfy with their methods with respect to development of quality software, whereas agile professionals are more satisfied with their methods with respect of better communication with their customers. With agility point of view, our study says that both methods have characteristics which support agility but not fully support, so in such case we need to customize features from both types of methodologies.
In recent years, many researchers in the area of reasoning have focussed on the adoption of rule languages for the Semantic Web that led to remarkable approaches offering various functionality. On one hand, this included language elements of the rule part itself like contexts, higher-orderness, and non-monotonic negation. On the other hand, the proper integration with ontology languages like RDF and OWL had to consider language-speci c properties like disjunctivity as well as the demand for using existing external components. The paper proposes a T
riple-oriented hybrid language that integrates the mentioned language elements.
Structuring enterprise information and supporting knowledge management is a growing application field for enterprise ontologies. Based on an industrial case from automotive supplier industries, the paper proposes the use of an ontology for artefact management in engineering of dependable systems, illustrated by the tool ArtefactManager. Navigation and search in the ArtefactManager is performed using categorizations of artefacts by means of so-called taxonomic paths through the enterprise ontology. One of the main challenges is to permit evolution at least for those parts of the ontology which are used for categorizing artefacts. This paper introduces an approach to support the evolution process on the taxonomy level in conjunction with the level of categorizations.
This report brings together three different areas, Ontology Learning, ontology reuse and patterns in Computer Science in general. These three areas may not seem to have much in common but the report aims to illustrate the potential of bringing them together and to outline research possibilities in the field. Patterns have been successfully applied as a means for facilitating reuse and managing complexity in many areas. So far not many pattern approaches have emerged in Ontology Engineering especially when considering patterns for use with Ontology Learning systems or patterns to facilitate reuse of ontologies. This report is concluded by a discussion about future research possibilities in the field. Among other things more exchange between Ontology Engineering and Software Engineering is suggested. Researchers should draw from already existing knowledge when creating ontology patterns. The most interesting applications of ontology patterns in the future are to further facilitate Ontology Learning, by for example using the patterns as construction templates, and to facilitate reuse of ontologies by using the patterns to search and sort ontology libraries.
Due to the increasing implementation of agile and networked manufacturing, supply chain has entered a new phase, virtual supply chain. The phase is characterized by the integration of activities, operations, and functions carried out at different and geographically distributed supply chain stages. The paper proposes an approach to the configuration of a network of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) being integrated into a supply chain. The SME supply chain configuration is based on a shared domain ontology for supply chain management, offering the configuration task as a function of supply chain management. Principles of the development of the shared ontology and possible ways of matching between enterprise and domain ontologies are considered.
In Software Engineering, patterns are an accepted way to facilitate and support reuse. This paper focuses on patterns in the field of Ontology Engineering and proposes a classification scheme for ontology patterns. The scheme divides ontology patterns into five levels: Application Patterns, Architecture Patterns, Design Patterns, Semantic Patterns, and Syntactic Patterns. Semantic and Syntactic Patterns are quite well-researched but the higher levels of pattern abstraction are so far almost unexplored. To illustrate the possibilities of patterns on
these levels some examples are discussed, together with ideas of future work.
High-quality and reusable ontologies are considered as key element of the Semantic Web and for successful semantic applications. Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) are addressing these quality and reusability issues by providing different types of patterns supporting ontology designers. ODPs are collected in various repositories, such as the catalogue maintained by the University of Manchester and the ODP portal at small and do not cover all types of patterns and all domains. Semantic Web applications could also benefit from additional types of patterns, such as enterprise model patterns and specialized software patterns for semantic applications.
Patterns are an approach to knowledge reuse that proved feasible and very beneficial in various areas, such as software engineering and data modeling. Reuse has been an important research subject in ontology engineering and the semantic web community for many years. Patterns need to be shared by a community in order to provide a common language and stimulate pattern usage and development. Hence, the aim of this workshop was twofold
- providing an arena for proposing and discussing good practices, patterns, pattern-based ontologies, systems etc
- broadening the pattern community that will develop its own “language” for discussing and describing relevant problems and their solutions.
The workshop included a track for research papers addressing various aspects of ontology patterns and investigating application areas, and a pattern track focusing on presentation and discussion of actual ontology patterns.
This paper presents experiences and conclusions from ontology engineering applied in the automotive suppliers domain. The work focuses on construction of enterprise ontologies to support structuring of enterprise information and knowledge management. Two methods for ontology construction, developed by previous research activities, were used in parallel when developing an ontology for a company in automotive supplier industries. One method is automatic and the other method is a manual approach. A conclusion was that the developed ontologies complemented each other well and therefore the decision was made to merge them for use in the project. The resulting ontology will now be used in several pilot applications.
Structuring enterprise information and supporting knowledge management is a growing application field for enterprise ontologies. Research work presented in this paper focuses on construction of enterprise ontologies. In an experiment, two methods were used in parallel when developing an ontology for a company in automotive supplier industries. One method is based on automatic ontology construction, the other method is a manual approach based on cookbook-like instructions. The paper compares and evaluates the methods and their results. For ontology evaluation, selected approaches were combined including both evaluation by ontology engineers and evaluation by domain experts. The main conclusion is that the compared methods have different strengths and an integration of both developed ontologies and used methods should be investigated.
This paper structures the summary of the panel held at the 9th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Funchal, Madeira, 12-16 June 2007 that addressed the following question: "Are you still working on Inter-Enterprise Systems and Application Integration?" The panel aggregated distinguished experts from the areas of process management, workflow, Web services, SOA, and Semantic Web.
Information systems have to be continuously updated due to changing requirements in the work environments of the enterprises. Enterprises are also changing their way of working towards networked organisations which demands a higher flexibility in the integration with different partners. Legacy systems represent valuable investments and information resources to take care of. Therefore there exists a demand to improve possibilities for changing and integrating software applications within and between enterprises. The intention with this paper is to penetrate the research that is being done in order to facilitate integration of software applications within and between enterprises. This involves enterprise modelling as well as software modelling.
Future work will concentrate on how to enable integration of software applications in the extended enterprise with changing needs, using enterprise modelling.
We discuss how an Enterprise Modelling approach, namely C3S3P, has been applied in an automotive supplier company. The paper concentrates on the phases of the C3S3P development process such as Concept Study, Scaffolding, Scoping, and Requirements Modelling. We have also presented the concept of task pattern which has been used in the MAPPER project for capturing, documenting and sharing best practices concerning business processes in organisation. Within this application context we have analysed our experiences concerning stakeholder participation and task pattern development.
Enterprise interoperability has been a research subject more than 2 decades and still offers numerous challenges for the scientific community. Based on an industrial case from automotive supplier industry and earlier work on variability modelling, this paper proposes to address enterprise interoperability by identifying correspondences and developing stepwise adjustment of enterprise models. The approach presented, called Connector Concept, puts equal focus on process and product knowledge when specifying interoperability requirements and has the long-term ambition to generate interfaces between IT-systems based on model integration. The main contributions of the work are (1) an initial method for connecting enterprise models of collaborating enterprises, (2) use of feature modelling for identification of interoperability requirements in product knowledge, and (3) an industrial case showing a concrete example and offering first experiences with the above approaches.
The work presented in this paper aims at contributing to enterprise interoperability. The focus is on collaboration in extended enterprises as general application field and active knowledge models as underlying technology. The starting point for the paper is an application case from automotive industry, where active knowledge models were developed for essential product development tasks. The paper concerns the development of a connector between these active knowledge models in order to support collaboration between two partners. The focus is on the operationalising phase of the connector development and on experiences. One result from this work is to propose three levels for the modeling, depending on the maturity level of the collaboration - searching for a partner, modeling existing collaboration and enhancing collaboration through detailed modeling.
We discuss how an Enterprise Modeling approach, namely C3S3P has been applied in an automotive supplier company. The chapter concentrates on the phases of the C3S3P development process such as Concept Study, Scaffolding, Scoping, and Requirements Modeling. We have also presented the concept of task pattern which has been used for capturing, documenting and sharing best practices concerning business processes in an organization. Within this application context we have analyzed our experiences concerning stakeholder participation and task pattern development. We have also described how we have derived four different categories of requirements from scenario descriptions for the task patterns and from modeling of the task patterns.
The goal of this thesis is to improve Usability and functionality of a tool for artifact management, which applies taxonomic paths for categorizing artifacts. The main issues of using the taxonomic paths are used for categorization and should improve the precision when retrieving documents. The results show the improvements in functionality and usability of the artifact manager. This thesis explains about Usability, re-engineering, and necessary infrastructure to improve the performance of the artifact manager tool.At the end of the thesis necessary modifications has been done to improve usability and functionality of artifact manager
Enterprise modeling (EM) is a discipline supporting business and IT alignment by providing means for capturing, visualizing and improving different perspectives of an enterprise, including processes,organization structures, products, systems, and business objectives. However, there is a lot of relevant information besides the one presented in enterprise models. Including such information into enterprise models or an integrated presentation of model and data view is supposed to ease decision making for stakeholders in organizations by providing contextual information for the decision at hand. Additional information however usually means additional complexity. This paper explores possibilities of an integrated presentation guided by the following questions: (1) What kind of complementary information should be visualized in an enterprise model? (2) How can the information be visualized? (3) How can the content of a specific visualization be adapted by the business stakeholder using it?
Possibilities and benefits of enhancing the existing enterprise models with visualization of additional information are illustrated using a small case study.
Enterprise knowledge modelling in general offers methods, tools and approaches for capturing knowledge about processes and products in formalized models in order to support organizational challenges. From the perspective of information systems development, the use of enterprise models traditionally is very strong in the earlier development phases, whereas approaches for applying enterprise models in later development phases exist, but are not as intensely researched and elaborated. We argue that enterprise models should be considered as carrier of enterprise knowledge, which can be used to a larger extent in creating actable solutions for enterprise problems. With competence supply as an example, the focus of the paper is on using enterprise models as interface for information searching. The main contributions of the paper are (1) to show that it is feasible and produces pertinent results to use enterprise models for expressing information demand, (2) architecture and implementation of an IT solution for this purpose and (3) lessons learned from validating this approach.
Many industries are facing a continuously changing business environment which partly is caused by new regulations and bylaws from regulating authorities. Ensuring compliance can cause substantial efforts, since conformance checks of business processes and organizational structures often have to be performed manually. The paper contributes to reducing these efforts by proposing tool support for analyzing enterprise models with the aim to use patterns for identifying potentially non-compliant parts of such models. Design patterns have been a fundamental tool for software development for many years. The approach of having predefined solutions can be beneficial for the purpose of compliance assessment as well. To this end a method to search and detect patterns within enterprise models is an important step. Based on a motivating scenario from automotive supplier industries, the paper proposes an approach and introduces a prototypical tool that finds similar matches to a given pattern by use of template matching with the normalized cross correlation as metric.