An Ontology-based Modelling Tool for Knowledge-intensive Services

Knut Hinkelmann, Simon Nikles, Lukas von Arx
2007 Extended Semantic Web Conference  
The ATHENE modelling tool enables business people to create knowledge-intense process models without having to know the complexity of modelling ontologies. ATHENE is based on a three-level hierarchy of metameta, meta and object level. It allows business people to model business processes graphically meanwhile these processes are transformed internally into ontologies. Objectives Modelling business processes as ontologies is cumbersome and requires in-depth expertise of semantic technologies.
more » ... ever, business process modelling is a task mainly for business people who lack this expertise. So, the fundamental problem is that traversing from one sphere to the other requires manual labour in any of the two directions, i.e. both for querying and manipulation the process space [4] . To overcome this difficulties we developed a system called ATHENE for graphical modelling of business processes that are automatically transformed into ontologies. It corresponds to the theories of the Semantic Business Process Management as described by Hepp et. al. [4] which combines semantic web services (SWS) and Business Process Management (BPM). From the user interface the modelling tool is equivalent to any other business process modelling tool. The business expert can model business processes in a familiar way. Internally, however, these models are represented as an ontology which results in a semantic representation of the process. The idea of modelling in ATHENE is illustrated in figure 1. On the meta-level there is an ontology defining the concepts and properties for business process and service modelling. Examples of these ontologies could be OWL-S [6] or WSMO [8]. OWL-S for example contains concepts for • atomic and composite services, • control constructs like sequence, split+join, if-then-else, iteration, while, switch, ... [6]
dblp:conf/esws/HinkelmannNA07 fatcat:slynr25iavgxxp5erpes7e4iza