Ontology Construction: Representing Dietz “Process” and “State” Models Using BPMN Diagrams

Abstract

Capturing knowledge has always been an objective although known to be costly and time consuming. ontologies, being “an explicit specification of a conceptualization,” have tried to capture knowledge within the aspects of concepts (used to represent a domain entity), relations (representing a interaction between the domain concepts), functions (a special case of relations), axioms (which represent true statements) and instances (used to represent domain elements). The Enterprise Ontology, which represents the work on ontologies applied to the enterprise, as proposed initially by Gruber, can be seen as a collection of terms and definitions relevant to business enterprises that can be used as a basis for decision making. A new concept of Enterprise Ontology proposed by Dietz is defined as the realization and implementation essence of an enterprise proposing a distinction world ontology and system ontology. The sequence of actions, according to Dietz can be classified as “datalogical”, “infological” and “ontological” and all become under a Transaction Pattern which consists of four basic states: “request”, “promise”, “state” and “accept”. Further more the author defines four models that can be used to verify the consistency of the actions: “Process”, “Action”, “State” and “Construction” models. The traditional way to model processes, like the BPMN, draw events, activities and data in a sequence of symbols that may not represent completely all the actions in presence and, above all, does not detect and identify consistency between actors and actions. However, BPMN diagrams can also be used to represent various actions and models proposed by Dietz as the transaction, “Process” and “State” diagrams. Both ways of representing have advantages and disadvantages and can be used, either isolated or together to give a deep representation of reality.