Process ontology
Encyclopedia
In computer science
, a process ontology is a description of the components and their relationships that make up a process. A formal process ontology is an ontology in the knowledge domain of processes. Often such ontologies take advantage of the benefits of an upper ontology. Planning software
can be used to perform plan generation based on the formal description of the process and its constraints. Numerous efforts have been made to define a process/planning ontology.
In philosophy
, a process ontology refers to a universal model of the structure of the world as an ordered wholeness. Such ontologies are Fundamental Ontologies
, in contrast to the so-called Applied Ontologies
. Fundamental ontologies do not claim to be accessible to any empirical
proof in itself, but to be a structural design pattern, out of which empirical phenomena can be explained and put together consistently. Throughout Western history, the dominating fundamental ontology is the so-called substance theory
. However, fundamental process ontologies are becoming more important in recent times, because the progress in the discovery of the foundations of physics spurred the development of a basic concept able to integrate such boundary notions as "Energy
," "Object
," and those of the physical dimensions of space
and time
.
s and sequence of events inherent in processes such as manufacturing, engineering and business process
es.
, and some are also written in OCML
.
A candidate model for the UPO was DDPO (DOLCE+DnS Plan Ontology), a planning ontology which specifies plans and distinguishes between abstract and executable plans. DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering) aims at capturing the ontological categories underlying natural language and human commonsense. DnS (Descriptions and Situations), is a constructivist ontology that allows for context-sensitive redescriptions of the types and relations postulated by other given ontologies (or ground vocabularies). Together in DDPO, DOLCE and DnS are used to build a Plan Ontology that includes physical and non-physical objects (social entities, mental objects and states, conceptualizations, information objects, constraints), events, states, regions, qualities, and constructivist situations. The main target of DDPO is tasks, namely the types of actions, their sequencing, and the controls performed on them.
). The purpose of oXPDL is to model the semantics of XPDL process models in standardized Web ontology languages such as OWL
and WSML
, while incorporating features of existing standard ontologies such as PSL
, RosettaNet
, SUMO
, and eClassOWL
.
. The related ontology m3pl, written in PSL
using the extension FLOWS (First Order Logic for Web Services), enables the extraction of choreography interfaces from workflow models.
The m3po ontology combines features of the following reference models and languages:
The m3po ontology is organized using five key aspects of workflow specifications and workflow management. Because different workflow models put a different emphasis on the five aspects, the most elaborate reference model for each aspect was used and combined into m3po.
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
, a process ontology is a description of the components and their relationships that make up a process. A formal process ontology is an ontology in the knowledge domain of processes. Often such ontologies take advantage of the benefits of an upper ontology. Planning software
Automated planning and scheduling
Automated planning and scheduling is a branch of artificial intelligence that concerns the realization of strategies or action sequences, typically for execution by intelligent agents, autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles. Unlike classical control and classification problems, the solutions are...
can be used to perform plan generation based on the formal description of the process and its constraints. Numerous efforts have been made to define a process/planning ontology.
In philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, a process ontology refers to a universal model of the structure of the world as an ordered wholeness. Such ontologies are Fundamental Ontologies
Fundamental ontology
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger made the distinction between ontical and ontological. Ontical refers to a particular area of Being, whereas ontological ought to refer to Being as such. The history of ontology in Western Philosophy is, in Heidegger's terms, properly speaking ontical, and...
, in contrast to the so-called Applied Ontologies
Applied ontology
Applied ontology involves the practical application of ontological resources to specific domains, such as biomedicine or geography. Much work in applied ontology is carried out within the framework of the semantic web...
. Fundamental ontologies do not claim to be accessible to any empirical
Empirical
The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation or experimentation. Empirical data are data produced by an experiment or observation....
proof in itself, but to be a structural design pattern, out of which empirical phenomena can be explained and put together consistently. Throughout Western history, the dominating fundamental ontology is the so-called substance theory
Substance theory
Substance theory, or substance attribute theory, is an ontological theory about objecthood, positing that a substance is distinct from its properties. A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears....
. However, fundamental process ontologies are becoming more important in recent times, because the progress in the discovery of the foundations of physics spurred the development of a basic concept able to integrate such boundary notions as "Energy
Energy
In physics, energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems...
," "Object
Object (philosophy)
An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...
," and those of the physical dimensions of space
Space
Space is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum...
and time
Time
Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....
.
Processes
A process may be defined as a set of transformations of input elements into output elements with specific properties, with the transformations characterized by parameters and constraints, such as in manufacturing or biology. A process may also be defined as the workflowWorkflow
A workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work...
s and sequence of events inherent in processes such as manufacturing, engineering and business process
Business process
A business process or business method is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product for a particular customer or customers...
es.
PSL
The Process Specification Language (PSL) is a process ontology developed for the formal description and modeling of basic manufacturing, engineering and business processes. This ontology provides a vocabulary of classes and relations for concepts at the ground level of event-instances, object-instances, and timepoints. PSL’s top level is built around the following:- Activity – a class or type of action, such as install-part, which is the class of actions in which parts are installed
- Activity-occurrence – an event or action that takes place at a specific place and time, such as a specific instance of install-part occurring at a specific timestampTimestampA timestamp is a sequence of characters, denoting the date or time at which a certain event occurred. A timestamp is the time at which an event is recorded by a computer, not the time of the event itself...
- Timepoint – a point in time
- Object – anything that is not a timepoint or an activity
Cyc
In a process/planning ontology developed for the ontology Cyc, classes and relations above the ground level of PSL allow processes to be described purely at the type-level. The ground level of PSL uses the primitives of event-instance, object-instance, and timepoint description. The types above the ground level of PSL have also been expressed in PSL, showing that the type-level and the ground level are relatively independent. The type-levels for the Cyc process ontology above this ground level use the following concepts:- Process – formalized as a script
- Aggregate process – a process at a level above that of a single episode of a process, to represent the numbers of participants in an action by ranges of integers and qualitative values like few or many
- Script – a typical pattern of events that can be expected to re-occur
- a script has subevents, which means that scripts are composite events
- Scene – a subevent of a script
- Roles/participants – specifies types of actors and objects that may play in the script or scene
- Conditions – precondition(s) that must be true for a scene (event) to be executable, and postcondition(s) (effects) that must be true after a scene
- Repetition – the number of repetitions of a process may be known, or may be unspecified, or may be repeated until a specific condition is true
Properties of ordering and constitution of repeated subevents for composite processes:- Begin-Ordered – subevents start at distinct time points that are totally ordered
- End-Ordered – subevents end at distinct time points that are totally ordered
- EndsBeforeEnd – subevents end before or at the same time as subevent instances which start before them
- Sequential – no overlapping subevents
- Terminating – there is a subevent after which no other subevents begin, and since all activities have a begin and end point, there is a time point at which the process ends
- Uniform – all subevents are of the same event type
- Identity – the identity of participants in a process, that actor(s) or object(s) playing a role in one scene or repetition are the same as those in another scene or repetition, is represented by constraints on possible participants
SUPER and DDPO
The project SUPER (Semantics Utilised for Process management within and between EnteRprises) has a goal of the definition of ontologies for Semantic Business Process Management (SBPM), but these ontologies can be reused in diverse environments. Part of this project is to define an Upper Process Ontology (UPO) that ties together all other SUPER ontologies. The results of the project SUPER include the UPO and a set of ontologies for processes and organizations. Most of the ontologies are written in WSMLWeb Services Modeling Language
WSML or Web Service Modeling Language is a formal language that provides a syntax and semantics for the Web Service Modeling Ontology ....
, and some are also written in OCML
OCML
Open Configuration and Management Layer is a universal application configuration and management layer that helps to develop integrated applications independent of underlying group of applications, configurations and management....
.
A candidate model for the UPO was DDPO (DOLCE+DnS Plan Ontology), a planning ontology which specifies plans and distinguishes between abstract and executable plans. DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering) aims at capturing the ontological categories underlying natural language and human commonsense. DnS (Descriptions and Situations), is a constructivist ontology that allows for context-sensitive redescriptions of the types and relations postulated by other given ontologies (or ground vocabularies). Together in DDPO, DOLCE and DnS are used to build a Plan Ontology that includes physical and non-physical objects (social entities, mental objects and states, conceptualizations, information objects, constraints), events, states, regions, qualities, and constructivist situations. The main target of DDPO is tasks, namely the types of actions, their sequencing, and the controls performed on them.
oXPDL
The ontology oXPDL is a process interchange ontology based on the standardised XML Process Definition Language (XPDLXPDL
The XML Process Definition Language is a format standardized by the Workflow Management Coalition to interchange business process definitions between different workflow products, i.e...
). The purpose of oXPDL is to model the semantics of XPDL process models in standardized Web ontology languages such as OWL
Web Ontology Language
The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...
and WSML
Web Services Modeling Language
WSML or Web Service Modeling Language is a formal language that provides a syntax and semantics for the Web Service Modeling Ontology ....
, while incorporating features of existing standard ontologies such as PSL
Process Specification Language
The Process Specification Language is a set of logic terms used to describe processes. The logic terms are specified in an ontology that provides a formal description of the components and their relationships that make up a process...
, RosettaNet
RosettaNet
RosettaNet is a non-profit consortium aimed at establishing standard processes for the sharing of business information . RosettaNet is a consortium of major Computer and Consumer Electronics, Electronic Components, Semiconductor Manufacturing, Telecommunications and Logistics companies working to...
, SUMO
Suggested Upper Merged Ontology
The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology or SUMO is an upper ontology intended as a foundation ontology for a variety of computer information processing systems. It was originally developed by the Teknowledge Corporation and now is maintained by . It is one candidate for the "standard upper ontology"...
, and eClassOWL
Eclass
eCl@ss is a product classification and description standard for information exchange between customers and their suppliers.eCl@ss is a de facto standard within the German energy industry, but competes with UNSPSC in the United States. In 2006 eCl@ss joined forces with ETIM, which is an important...
.
GFO
The General Formal Ontology (GFO) is an ontology integrating processes and objects. GFO includes elaborations of categories like objects, processes, time and space, properties, relations, roles, functions, facts, and situations. GFO allows for different axiomatizations of its categories, such as the existence of atomic time-intervals vs. dense time. Two of the specialties of GFO are its account of persistence and its time model. Regarding persistence, the distinction between endurants (objects) and perdurants (processes) is made explicit within GFO by the introduction of a special category, a persistant. A persistant is a special category with the intention that its instances "remain identical" over time. With respect to time, time intervals are taken as primitive in GFO, and time-points (called "time boundaries") are derived. Moreover, time-points may coincide, which is convenient for modelling instantaneous changes.m3po and m3pl
The multi metamodel process ontology (m3po) combines workflows and choreography descriptions so that it can be used as a process interchange ontology. For internal business processes, Workflow Management Systems are used for process modelling and allow describing and executing business processes. For external business processes, choreography descriptions are used to describe how business partners can cooperate. A choreography can be considered to be a view of an internal business process with the internal logic not visible, similar to public views on private workflows. The m3po ontology unifies both internal and external business processes, combining reference models and languages from the workflow and choreography domains. The m3po ontology is written in WSMLWeb Services Modeling Language
WSML or Web Service Modeling Language is a formal language that provides a syntax and semantics for the Web Service Modeling Ontology ....
. The related ontology m3pl, written in PSL
Process Specification Language
The Process Specification Language is a set of logic terms used to describe processes. The logic terms are specified in an ontology that provides a formal description of the components and their relationships that make up a process...
using the extension FLOWS (First Order Logic for Web Services), enables the extraction of choreography interfaces from workflow models.
The m3po ontology combines features of the following reference models and languages:
- XPDLXPDLThe XML Process Definition Language is a format standardized by the Workflow Management Coalition to interchange business process definitions between different workflow products, i.e...
– a standard for exchanging workflow models, without runtime information, between different workflow management systems - PSLProcess Specification LanguageThe Process Specification Language is a set of logic terms used to describe processes. The logic terms are specified in an ontology that provides a formal description of the components and their relationships that make up a process...
– an ontology that allows the capture of the semantics of workflow models and enables translations of models between workflow management systems - YAWLYAWLThis article is about the workflow system. For the sailing craft, see yawl.YAWL is a workflow language based on the Workflow patterns. The language is supported by a software system that includes an execution engine, a graphical editor and a worklist handler...
– a research workflow language that supports all workflow patterns directly - BPEL – an executable business process language and includes an abstract protocol
- WS-CDLWS-CDLThe Web Services Choreography Description Language is a W3C candidate recommendation. It is a language for describing how peer-to-peer participants collaborate...
– a multi-party collaboration model
The m3po ontology is organized using five key aspects of workflow specifications and workflow management. Because different workflow models put a different emphasis on the five aspects, the most elaborate reference model for each aspect was used and combined into m3po.
- Functional and Behavioural – the most important concepts are processType, processOccurrence, activityType and activityOccurrence
- Informational – defined by data and data-flow
- Organizational – defines who is responsible for carrying out a specific task; security related issues
- Operational – interaction of the workflows with their environment by manual tasks performed by users and automatic tasks performed by automated computer programs
- Orthogonal – scheduling based on time; integrity and failure recovery
See also
- Automated planning and schedulingAutomated planning and schedulingAutomated planning and scheduling is a branch of artificial intelligence that concerns the realization of strategies or action sequences, typically for execution by intelligent agents, autonomous robots and unmanned vehicles. Unlike classical control and classification problems, the solutions are...
- Business processBusiness processA business process or business method is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product for a particular customer or customers...
- Manufacturing process managementManufacturing Process ManagementManufacturing process management is a collection of technologies and methods used to define how products are to be manufactured. MPM differs from ERP/MRP which is used to plan the ordering of materials and other resources, set manufacturing schedules, and compile cost data.A cornerstone of MPM is...
- Process managementProcess managementProcess management is the ensemble of activities of planning and monitoring the performance of a process. The term usually refers to the management of business processes and manufacturing processes...
- Sequence of events
- Upper ontology (information science)