Organization Structure Description for the Needs …

1 Organization Structure Description for theNeeds of Semantic business ProcessManagementWitold Abramowicz1, Agata Filipowska1 Monika Kaczmarek1, CarlosPedrinaci2, Monika Starzecka1, and Adam Walczak11 Pozna n University of Economics, Department of Information Systems,60-967 Pozna n, Poland,{ , , , home page: Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, home page: attempts have been undertaken to further automatethe BPM lifecycle. One of the recent initiatives in this area is the Se-mantic business process Management approach as pursued within theSUPER project. It aims at bridging the gap between business and ITworlds by increasing the degree of automation within the BPM lifecycleusing Semantic Web and Semantic Web services technologies. In orderto fulfil the SBPM vision, enterprises as well as their environment needto be properly described. The main contribution of this paper is a set ofontologies for describing organizational structures and examples showinghow they may be combined with further organizational information, , business functions and business roles, to support the automatic analysisof business IntroductionA business process may be defined as a set of related, ordered activities thatcontribute to the production of good(s) or the delivery of some service.}

2 It em-phasises how the work is done within an Organization and by its organizationmembers. Therefore, organizations have their own context for any running busi-ness process even if they operate in the same domain. This context embracesinformation like used resources, strategies, enterprise Structure as well as rolesand functions. However, when modelling business processes using current stan-dardized notations ( BPMN) a lot of information, especially on organizationalaspects, cannot be attempts were undertaken to achieve automation of the BPM lifecy-cle. One of the most advanced initiatives in this area is the concept of SemanticBusiness process Management developed within the SUPER project (Seman-tic Utilised for process Management with and between Enterprises). It aims atbridging the gap between business and IT worlds by increasing the degree ofautomation within the BPM lifecycle using Semantic Web and Semantic Webservices order to fulfil the SBPM vision, apart from the semantic Description of theprocess flow (control Structure ), the process content Description is also process content relates to the enterprise and its environment and therefore,must rely on a proper Organization Description .

3 Furthermore, for these aspectsto take part in any automated processing they need to be expressed in a formaland machine readable form. The goal of this paper is to present a set of ontolo-gies that support capturing organisational information as required for realizingthe Semantic business process Management vision. We present four ontologiessupporting the semantic representation of a process content and position themwithin the entire organizational framework developed within the SUPER overall approach we propose in based on the use of ontological descriptionsof process flow enriched with additional descriptions of the related resources, theorganisational entities involved, the roles required, etc as proposed earlier in [1].The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: first, we discuss the scopefor the semantic Description of an Organization . Then, four ontologies, namely Or-ganizational Structure Ontology, Organisational Units Ontology, business Func-tions Ontology and business Roles Ontology are shortly described followed byan example of process Description with the use of developed ontologies.

4 Finally,we position our work within the state of the art in the area of semantic represen-tation of an enterprise. Finally we present some conclusion and introduce linesfor future Semantic Representation of OrganizationIn order to describe an Organization for the Needs of the Semantic business Pro-cess Management, an appropriate vocabulary Needs to be provided. It shouldallow for the Description of both processes and process artefacts ( process con-tent). As mentioned, the volume of knowledge needed to adequately describeall organizational details relevant to any given element of a business processis immense. In order to represent this knowledge, relevant contextual informa-tion need to be extracted as well as important elements and aspects need to main aspects that need to be captured are the process Structure andenterprise domain specific terms (see Figure 2). The process related vocabularyis important to ensure a proper and unambiguous representation of control flowof processes within and between enterprises, while the latter part of stack is toprovide a specific representation of a domain of given Organization .

5 Therefore,the process -related information ( process ontologies) describes the Structure ofa process ( tasks, control structures, links etc.), whereas organisation relatedontologies provide a Description of enterprise artefacts ( actors, functions etc.)that are utilised or involved in the process realization. The domain ontologiesprovide the additional information specific to an Organization from a given do-main. As already stated in the introduction, the focus of this paper is on theorganizational ontologies that provide a high-level view on the Organization andprocess-related space. Therefore, it is to provide vocabulary and constraints fordescribing the environment in which processes are carried out from the organi-zation s perspective to allow describing actors, roles and other resources thatmay be referred to in the process definitions [1]. process OntologiesOrganisationalOntologiesDomain OntologiesTask 1 Task 2 Task 3 Fig. Ontology StackWithin the SUPER project we identified the following areas of the organisa-tion Description : business functions, business roles, organisational units, organ-isational Structure , process resources, enterprise strategy and modelling guide-lines.

6 Each area is addressed by the respective ontology. All ontologies form anontology stack for the Needs of organizational aspects representation and usagewithin the business process modelling phase. The approach applied in SUPERwas built based on previous achievements in the field of organisation modellingand was shaped by an extensive BPM practice while the preceding approaches in-volved mainly traditional managerial concepts. Hence, the SUPER view is morecompact ( it decomposes the institutional internal Structure into functionsand roles) whereas it also seems to be less human-centred (comparing skillsand staff elements to resources of a process ). The important similarities embracethe more general view on the Organization ; highlighting the elements that influ-ence the institutional environment ( strategy and modelling guidelines) in acomprehensive a fully comprehensive model of an enterprise, is a particularly chal-lenging and demanding task which would require an extremely extensive andcomplex conceptualisation which it would be difficult to manage, adapt, andextend.

7 Therefore, we propose instead a modular ontology stack that providesbasic notions, systematizes them and thus provide the foundation for furtherdevelopment able to address the Needs of a particular a short Description of ontologies constituting the SUPER organisa-tional ontologies stack follows: business Functions - providing vocabulary to describe the hierarchy of dif-ferent functions that may be carried out within a company ( marketing,finance, HR) in order to enable vendor and domain independent classifica-tion of company processes and process fragments providing abstraction oversingle tasks constituting processes. business Roles - representing roles in the organisation Designer, ProcessModeller, IT Expert, CEO. Organizational Structure and Organisational Units Ontologies presenting de-tailed view on the organisational Structure of an entity being described. process Resources - describing applications and resources that should bespent when carrying out processes ( documents, IT systems, or any otherresources needed to accomplish a task) or that may be a result of a certaintask in a process .

8 Enterprise Strategy - in order to model information related to an enterprisestrategy, targeted markets, beneficiaries of the company and some surround-ings that influence the processes carried out in a company. Modelling Guidelines - used to describe policies and rules that should betaken into account during processes the following sections, the business Organizational Structure Ontologies aswell as the Functions and business Roles Ontologies constituting a part of theontologies stack are presented. The final shape (concepts and relations) of on-tologies is a result of thorough analysis of the most representative ERP systemstogether with the critical approach towards the related work described in sec-tion 7. The expert knowledge was also an important source of inspiration. Allmentioned ontologies were modelled using the WSML Organization Structure ontologyThe Organizational Structure Ontology (OSO) focuses on supporting the def-inition of organisational structures.

9 Following literature from this domain, theorganisational Structure may be defined as a Structure and/or hierarchy of anorganization and how its constituents work together to achieve common , an organizational Structure encompasses: departments, employees,their responsibilities, resources etc. as well as relations among them. The Organi-zational Structure Ontology is designed as an upper level ontology and thereforeprovides a main Structure and relations aiming at achieving the domain inde-pendency. OSO Structure is a result of analysis and mixture of a few described ina literature organisational Structure models. The developed Structure was basedand/or inspired by [2 7].Figure 3 depicts the proposed Structure of OSO. For readability purposes, alldesigned relations, not just subsumption ones, are included in the Entity Non-legal EntityRoleOrganisationalPositionOrganisa tionalUnitResourcePersonBusinessFunction has Sub-Unitconsists ofas signed toSkillsconsists ofis-ais-ais-ais-aplaysownsowns / has accessowns / has accessperformsworks ashasrequiresFig.

10 Structure OntologyThe Structure of the developed ontology makes it easy for other ontologiescreated within SUPER to import OSO concepts and use them as super concepts( business Roles Ontology, business Functions Ontology, Resource Ontol-ogy, and finally Organizational Unit Ontology may import OSO). OSO links allorganizational ontologies developed so far in the SUPER project and enablesdescription of organizational following concepts are included in the OSO ontology: Organization - a social arrangement which pursues collective goals, whichcontrols its own performance, and which has a boundary separating it fromits environment Legal Entity - an entity that can enter into a legal contract[2]. Non-legal Entity - an entity within a company with a role and businessfunction assigned. It is a coherent formation in a company Structure , but hasno entitlement to act as an autonomous participant of economical processes[2]. Organizational Unit - any recognized association of people in the context ofan enterprise.