Using Multi Tier Contract Ontology to Deduce Contract Workflow Models for Enterprise Process Interoperability

• Ontologies are being proposed as a medium for affecting enterprise application integration. Though it is widely accepted that ontologies can support inter- enterprise interoperability, the exact nature and extent to which ontology may be useful is uncertain. We promote the use of ontology in a two-fold way: first, as a knowledge base for fostering human-to-human shared understanding; second, as an ‘interlingua’ for promoting human-to-machine specification as well as semantics-to-execution. The proposed concept is described using a case scenario in the realm of legal business contracts, followed by their integration to the business domain, with an objective to model contract compliant business process models. With the case, we illustrate the use of Multi-Tier Contract Ontology (MTCO) to deduce a high level, partial business process model named the Contract Workflow Model (CWM). Such a model, from the business process perspective, may be used as a skeleton for designing internal business processes for each individual contracting party, or for mapping to existing processes.

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vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)