Abstract
Business modelling research is increasingly interested in exploring how domain ontologies can be used as reference models for business models. The Resource Event Agent (REA) ontology is a primary candidate for ontology-driven modelling of business processes because the REA point of view on business reality is close to the conceptual modelling perspective on business models. In this paper Ontology Engineering principles are employed to reengineer REA in order to make it more suitable for ontology-driven business modelling. The new conceptual representation of REA that we propose uses a single representation formalism, includes a more complete domain axiomatizat-ion (containing definitions of concepts, concept relations and ontological axioms), and is proposed as a generic model that can be instantiated to create valid business models. The effects of these proposed improvements on REA-driven business modelling are demonstrated using a business modelling example.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Pateli, A.G., Giaglis, G.M.: A research framework for analysing eBusiness models. European Journal of Information Systems 13, 302–314 (2004)
Fox, M.S.: The TOVE Project: A Common-sense Model of The Enterprise. In: Belli, F., Radermacher, F. (eds.) Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, pp. 25–24. Springer, Berlin (1992)
Ushold, M., King, M., Moralee, S., Zorgios, Y.: The Enterprise Ontology. The Knowledge Engineering Review: Special Issue on Putting Ontologies to Use 13, 31–89 (1998)
Gordijn, J.: Value based requirements engineering: Exploring innovative e-commerce ideas. Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam (2002)
Geerts, G.L., McCarthy, W.E.: An Ontological Analysis of the Economic Primitives of the Extended-REA Enterprise Information Architecture. International Joural of Accounting Information Systems 3, 1–16 (2002)
Osterwalder, A.: The Business Model Ontology - a proposition in a design science approach. Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales. University of Lausanne, Lausanne (2004)
Andersson, B., Bergholtz, M., Edirisuriya, A., Ilayperuma, T., Johannesson, P., Grégoire, B., Schmitt, M., Dubois, E., Abels, S., Hahn, A., Gordijn, J., Weigand, H., Wangler, B.: Towards a Reference Ontology for Business Models. In: Embley, D.W., Olivé, A., Ram, S. (eds.) ER 2006. LNCS, vol. 4215, Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Dietz, J.L.G.: Enterprise Ontology: Theory and Methodology. Springer, New York (2006)
Guarino, N.: Understanding, building and using ontologies. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 46, 293–310 (1997)
McCarthy, W.E.: The REA Accounting Model: A Generalized Framework for Accounting Systems in A Shared Data Environment. The Accounting Review, 554–578 (july 1982)
Gailly, F., Poels, G.: Towards Ontology-driven Information Systems: Redesign and Formalization of the REA Ontology. In: Gailly, F., Poels, G. (eds.) BIS 2007. LNCS, vol. 4439, Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
UN/CEFACT: UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) User Guide. (2003)
ECIMF: E-Commerce Integration Meta-Framework. Final draft. ECIMF Project Group (2003)
McCarthy, W.E.: The REA Modelling Approach to Teaching Accounting Information Systems. Issues in Accounting Education 18, 427–441 (2003)
Gailly, F., Poels, G.: Towards a Formal Representation of the Resource Event Agent Pattern International Conference on Enterprise Systems and Accounting (ICESAcc), Greece (2006)
Hruby, P.: Model-driven design using business patterns. Springer, New York (2006)
Geerts, G., McCarthy, W.E.: The Ontological Foundation of REA Enterprise Information Systems (2005)
Geerts, G., McCarthy, W.E.: Policy-Level Specification in REA Enterprise Information Systems. Journal of Information Systems Fall (2006)
Gómez-Pérez, A., Rojas, M.D.: Ontological Reengineering and Reuse. In: Fensel, D., Studer, R. (eds.) 11th European Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling and Management, pp. 139–156. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Kogut, P., Cranefield, S., Hart, L., Dutra, M., Baclawski, K., Kokar, M.K., Smith, J.: UML for ontology development. Knowledge Engineering Review 17, 61–64 (2002)
Spaccapietra, S., Parent, C., Vangenot, C., Cullot, N.: On Using Conceptual Modeling for Ontologies. In: Bussler, C.J., Hong, S.-k., Jun, W., Kaschek, R., Kinshuk, Krishnaswamy, S., Loke, S.W., Oberle, D., Richards, D., Sharma, A., Sure, Y., Thalheim, B. (eds.) Web Information Systems – WISE 2004 Workshops. LNCS, vol. 3307, pp. 22–23. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Spyns, P.: Object Role Modelling for ontology engineering in the DOGMA framework. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z., Herrero, P. (eds.) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2005: OTM 2005 Workshops. LNCS, vol. 3762, pp. 710–719. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Mylopoulos, J.: Information modeling in the time of the revolution. Information Systems 23, 127–155 (1998)
OMG: Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) - Sixth Revised Submission to OMG/ RFP ad/2003-03-40. Object management Group (2006)
Jarrar, M.: Towards Methodological Principles for Ontology Engineering. STARLAB. Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel (2005)
Assmann, U., Zchaler, S., Wagner, G.: Ontologies, Meta-Models, and the Model-Driven Paradigm. In: Calero, C., Ruiz, F., Piattini, M. (eds.) Ontologies for Software Engineering and Software Technology (2006)
Dunn, C.L., Cherrington, J.O., Hollander, A.S.: Enterprise Information Systems: A Pattern Based Approach. McGraw-Hill, New York (2005)
Geerts, G., McCarthy, W.E.: An Accounting Object Infrastructure for Knowledge Based Enterprise Models. IEEE Intelligent Systems and Their Applications 14, 89–94 (1999)
Gailly, F., Laurier, W., Poels, G.: Positioning REA as a Business Domain Ontology. Resource Event Agent -25 (REA-25) Conference, Newark, Delaware, USA (2007)
Ontology, O.M.G.: Definition Metamodel: OMG Adopted Specification (ptc/06-10-11). Object Management Group (2006)
Gómez-Pérez, A., Fernández-López, M., Corcho, O.: Ontological Engineering. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Maes, A., Poels, G.: Evaluating Quality of Conceptual Models Based on User Perceptions. In: Embley, D.W., Olivé, A., Ram, S. (eds.) ER 2006. LNCS, vol. 4215, Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gailly, F., Poels, G. (2007). Ontology-Driven Business Modelling: Improving the Conceptual Representation of the REA Ontology. In: Parent, C., Schewe, KD., Storey, V.C., Thalheim, B. (eds) Conceptual Modeling - ER 2007. ER 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4801. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75563-0_28
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75563-0_28
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75562-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75563-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)