Modelling of Reusable Business Processes: An Ontology-Based Approach

Abstract

Reuse is one of most important issues in information systems (IS) engineering. Information systems mostly are used to support some business and must be aligned with supported business in all aspects. From the point of view of IS engineering, any business can be considered as a system that can be decomposed into two interrelated, however, relatively independent layers: basic entities that usually are referred as registered units (Caplinskas and Vasilecas 1998) and processes in which some basic entities are acting as actors. Other basic entities are used as process resources or manipulated by the processes as objects processed performing business transactions (business objects). Although each business process has its own view on basic entities, such entities also have some process-independent ontological properties. In information systems ontological properties of basic entities are registered and stored in process-independent databases called registers (Caplinskas and Vasilecas 1998). The notion of register comprises also service required to create and maintain appropriate database. In this paper we use term application domain to refer to the knowledge about basic entities and their ontological properties, and term problem domain to refer to the knowledge about a particular business process including knowledge about the specific, required only in the context of this process, properties of basic entities. So, in the proposed terms, each IS has one application domain and a number of problem domains.