Collaborative process definition using an ontology-based approach

Abstract

This paper presents an ontology-based approach dedicated to automate the specification of collaborative processes for virtual organization networks. Our approach takes as input the knowledge coming from the characterization of network and produces as output a BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) compliant process. The collaborative network ontology (CNO) including deduction rules has been defined in order to accomplish this approach under two keys (i) some specific attributes of the considered collaboration included network and participant (ii) collaborative processes inspired from the enterprise Process Handbook (MIT). This CNO coupled with a reasoning engine will be used with an editor, provided by EBM WebSourcing, to model the network and build the collaborative process of a given collaboration. A model transformation will be applied after that to convert a collaborative process of the editor to a BPMN relevant one. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.