Ontology-based data integration

About: Ontology-based data integration is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11065 publications have been published within this topic receiving 216888 citations.

An ontology for the Business Process Modelling Notation

Abstract: In this paper we describe a formal ontological description of the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), one of the most popular languages for business process modelling. The proposed ontology (the BPMN Ontology) provides a classification of all the elements of BPMN, together with the formal description of the attributes and conditions describing how the elements can be combined in a BPMN business process description. Using the classes and properties defined in the BPMN Ontology any BPMN diagram can be represented as an A-box (i.e., a set of instances and assertions on them) of the ontology: this allows the exploitation of ontological reasoning services such as consistency checking and query answering to investigate the compliance of a process with the BPMN Specification as well as other structural property of the process. The paper also presents the modelling process followed for the creation of the BPMN Ontology, and describes some application scenarios exploiting the BPMN Ontology.

ManuService ontology: a product data model for service-oriented business interactions in a cloud manufacturing environment

Abstract: The ever-increasing distributed, networked and crowd-sourced cloud environment imposes the need of a service-oriented product data model for explicit representation of service requests in global manufacturing-service networks. The work in this paper aims to develop such a description framework for products based on semantic web technologies to facilitate the make-to-individual production strategy in a cloud manufacturing environment. A brief discussion on the requirements of a product data model in cloud manufacturing and research on product data modelling is given in the first part. A systematic ontology development methodology is then proposed and elaborated. The ontology called ManuService has been developed, consisting of all necessary concepts for description of products in a service-oriented business environment. These concepts include product specifications, quality constraints, manufacturing processes, organisation information, cost expectations, logistics requirements, and etcetera. ManuService ontology provides a module-based, reconfigurable, privacy-enhanced and standardised approach to modelling customised manufacturing service requests. An industrial case is presented to demonstrate possible applications using ManuService ontology. Comprehensive discussions are given thereafter, including a pilot application of a software package for semantic-based product design and a semantic web-based module for intelligent knowledge-based decision-making based on ManuService. ManuService forms the basis for collaborative service-oriented business interactions, intelligent and secure service provision in cloud manufacturing environment.

Comparison of ontology-based semantic-similarity measures.

Abstract: Semantic -similarity measures quantify concept similarities in a given ontology. Potential applications for these measures include search, data mining, and knowledge discovery in database or decision -support systems that utiliz e ontologies. To date, there have not been comparisons of the different semantic -similarity approaches on a single ontology. Such a comparison can offer insight on the validity of different approaches. We compared 3 approaches to semantic similarity -metri cs (which rely on expert opinion, ontologies only, and information content) with 4 metrics applied to SNOMED -CT. We found that there was poor agreement among those metrics based on information content with the ontology only metric . T he metric based only o n the ontology structure cor related most with expert opinion . Our results suggest that metric s based on the ontology only may be preferable to information -content –based metrics, and point to the need for more research on validating the different approaches .

On the road to behavior-based integration

Abstract: Integration of autonomous object-oriented systems requires the integration of object structure and object behaviour. Research in federated information systems has so far mainly addressed integration of object structure. The integration of object behaviour carries with it the promise to finally move integration tools beyond the state of the art at which they have (roughyl) existed for the better part of a decade, and we are embarked on a project that examines this problem in terms of object life cycles. The topic is also increasing in actuality since it also applies to the integration of business processes, which is typically required when companies merge or enter into consumer-producer relationships, and results can be expected to naturally extend to the arena of web services. Ultimately, the goal will be to define consistency criteria for behaviour integration and apply them in integration tools that guide the definition of global behavioural views upon autonomous object-oriented systems.