Recommendation-based Conceptual Modelling and Ontology Evolution Framework

Abstract

Within an enterprise, various stakeholders create different conceptual models, such as process, data, and requirements models. These models are fundamentally based on similar underlying enterprise (domain) concepts, but they differ in focus, use different modelling languages, take different viewpoints, utilize different terminology, and are used to develop different enterprise artefacts, as such, they typically lack consistency and interoperability. This issue can be solved by enterprise-specific ontologies, which serve as a reference during the conceptual model creation. Using such a shared semantic repository makes conceptual models interoperable and facilitates model integration. The challenge to accomplish this is twofold: on the one hand, an up-to-date enterprise-specific ontology needs to be created and maintained, and on the other hand, different modellers also need to be supported in their use of the enterprise-specific ontology. In this article, we propose to tackle these challenges by means of a recommendation-based conceptual modelling and an ontology evolution framework, and we focus in particular on ontology-based modelling support. To this end, we present our framework for Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) as a conceptual modelling language, and focus on how modellers can be assisted during the modelling process and how this impacts the semantic quality of the resulting models. Subsequently, we present a first, large-scale explorative experiment involving 140 business students to evaluate the BPMN instantiation of our framework. The experiments show promising results with regard to incurred overhead, intention of use and model interoperability