Research And Application Of Business Modeling And Transformation Based On Ontology

The Business Process Management (BPM) is becoming more and more important inenterprise operations. But there are many promblems that impede the effiency of BPM.Business Model is the most effective way to describe the corporation resources. A largeamout of business staffs and IT developers have involved in its construction and use. Themisunderstanding of business process models will bring many inconviencies to enterpriseoperations and the pure manual input for text information of models will lead the ineffiency ofbusiness modeling. Moreover, the gaps and the loose semantic relationship between businessprocess design phase and execution phase also decrease the effectiveness of BPM.In order to solve these problems, a business process management framework based onthree-layer ontology has been proposed in this paper. This framework can support the wholelifecycle of BPM, ensure the consistency of business model semantics, reduce the degree ofmanual input in business modeling, increase the reuse of business model and narrow the gapsbetween the business modeling and business process execution. In this paper, the key pointsof research work have focused on the business modeling and service transformation. Thedetails are shown as follows:(1) A business process management framework based on three-layer ontology isproposed. This framework covers the whole lifecycle of BPM, including business modeldesigning, the storage and management of models and services, the process execution and theinformation feedback. A information cycle is built to ensure the sustainability of theframework. (2) The structure of three-layer ontology, the metamodel of WSDL2.0and theirrelationships are presented. The three-layer ontology includes the general ontology forbusiness modeling, the domain ontology for special industry and the scene ontology forprocess execution. The general ontology covers the four aspects of business modeling,including information resource, organization structure, funcionpoint and process. The domainontology defines the general framework for a special industry. The scene ontology defines thecore information involved in process execution. By constructing the relationship between thethree-layer ontology and WSDL metamodel, the preliminary work of transformation frommodels to services is completed.(3) Focusing on the business modeling phase, a multi-view business modelingmechanism based on ontology is proposed, which includes the semantic binding method tobusiness modeling, the replacement method of domain ontology and the algorithms ofmulti-view business modeling. By parsing the ontology file, business modeling work can becompleted by selecting the candidate business model elements provided by the system.(4) Focusing on the model transformation phase, a mapping mechanism from models toservices is proposed. By binding the WSDL metamodel with the three-layer ontology, amapping algorithm is presented to transfer the model files to WSDL files. The WSDL file cansupport both REST service and SOAP service.A multi-view modeling and model management prototype system is implemented toverify the effectiveness of the presented method. A logistic ontology is built as input tovalidate the usability of the prototype system, including the mult-view modeling and thetransformation from models to WSDL files. The result shows that the presented method cansupport the BPM, improve the effiency of business modeling, ensure the consistency of modelsemantics, support the smooth transition between process design and process execution. Theproposed methodology has a practical application value.