Engineering a Generic Web Ontology for Interactions

  • Baghdadi, Youcef (PI)

Project: Other project

Project Details

Description

The concept of interactions has been given much importance in many disciplines, including the computing related ones such as artificial intelligence, databases, and distributed systems. An interaction involves two actors that act in re-action to each other action [1]. In information systems, the communities considered the interactions from the perspective of cooperation in different situations such as cooperation between subsystems (e.g., databases), cooperation between people (e.g., groupware), and cooperation at the organization level. Cooperation is considered as solutions, through cooperative information systems, to the distribution that results from the organization of work, but specifically from the widespread information and communication technologies (ICT) [2]. These solutions are primarily integration architectures that abstract syntactic and semantic interoperability to enable cooperation between actors (i.e., subsystems of the information systems In addition, enterprises need to implement interactions for different purposes and in different situations [3]. Indeed interactions do: ? Happen at different levels, as the involved actors may be subsystems of the enterprise information system, employees, customers, partners, suppliers, competitors, and even things of the enterprise and its environment. ? Constitute solutions for the business changing requirements in terms of value resulting from different types of collaborations, as they constitute solutions for supporting flexible intra- and cross business processes (BPs), interfacing the enterprise to its environment, and enabling its objects to interact within their environment. ? Enable emerging knowledge that does exist anywhere, as the knowledge emerging from the interactions of the involved actors is greater than the sum of their knowledge. This knowledge may be used in day-to-day operation, business intelligence, or business analytics. From a technology perspective, most of the integration for intra- and inter- organizational BPs has been driven by advances in technology [4, 5] and realized, on case-by-case basis, by using adapters, wrappers, object oriented middleware such as CORBA, DCOM, or EJB, which has resulted in the well-known N*(N-1) integration problem [6]. The distributed Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that is based on Web services technology has been expected to enable integration, composition, flexibility, and agility [7,8]. Indeed, Web services technology is a de facto internet integration standard. Web services technology allows interfacing, publishing, and binding loosely coupled services on the web. Applications are offered as services both within and across the enterprise with lower development costs [9, 10]. However, still there is a lack of a comprehensive view of the enterprise interactions, within the enterprise architecture, which enables their engineering. In this work, interactions are considered from a conceptual perspective, namely a value added perspective of the work organization and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Indeed, while work organization and ICT have widespread the distribution, they constitute solutions for adding value, specifically in terms of: (i) architectures for integration such as supply chain, extended enterprise, virtual enterprise and integrated enterprise, (ii) interfaces for enterprise social interactions, and (iii) architecture for cooperating objects such as those in the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Therefore, there is a need for comprehensive conceptualization that leads to a shared, reusable ontology, i.e., ?a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization? [11]. We build on this definition to use conceptualization that refers to a comprehensive, abstract model of the interactions that: ? Constitutes a step towards Web ontology for interactions. ? Guides the engineering methods of the interactions, including processes, representation techniques, languages, and tools. This project presents a typology of the enterprise interactions, as a first step towards ontology for interactions that facilitates their engineering. First, it separates the interaction activities from the business activities. Then, it distinguishes the different types of interactions by their nature, their issues, and their current realizations with ICT. Finally, it conceptualizes them into Web ontology for the purpose of (1) their modeling, design, realization, evaluation, analysis, (2) reusing in a kind reasoning mechanism or query to instantiate a domain ontology specific to any type of the collaborations in Omani organizations. This ontology would first allow a common, shared understanding of the different types of collaborations that happen in any project, then instantiate it for a specific collaborative project, and finally use the Web technologies to interact.

Layman's description

The concept of interactions has been given much importance in many disciplines, including the computing related ones such as artificial intelligence, databases, and distributed systems. An interaction involves two actors that act in re-action to each other action [1]. In information systems, the communities considered the interactions from the perspective of cooperation in different situations such as cooperation between subsystems (e.g., databases), cooperation between people (e.g., groupware), and cooperation at the organization level. Cooperation is considered as solutions, through cooperative information systems, to the distribution that results from the organization of work, but specifically from the widespread information and communication technologies (ICT) [2]. These solutions are primarily integration architectures that abstract syntactic and semantic interoperability to enable cooperation between actors (i.e., subsystems of the information systems In addition, enterprises need to implement interactions for different purposes and in different situations [3]. Indeed interactions do: ? Happen at different levels, as the involved actors may be subsystems of the enterprise information system, employees, customers, partners, suppliers, competitors, and even things of the enterprise and its environment. ? Constitute solutions for the business changing requirements in terms of value resulting from different types of collaborations, as they constitute solutions for supporting flexible intra- and cross business processes (BPs), interfacing the enterprise to its environment, and enabling its objects to interact within their environment. ? Enable emerging knowledge that does exist anywhere, as the knowledge emerging from the interactions of the involved actors is greater than the sum of their knowledge. This knowledge may be used in day-to-day operation, business intelligence, or business analytics. From a technology perspective, most of the integration for intra- and inter- organizational BPs has been driven by advances in technology [4, 5] and realized, on case-by-case basis, by using adapters, wrappers, object oriented middleware such as CORBA, DCOM, or EJB, which has resulted in the well-known N*(N-1) integration problem [6]. The distributed Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that is based on Web services technology has been expected to enable integration, composition, flexibility, and agility [7,8]. Indeed, Web services technology is a de facto internet integration standard. Web services technology allows interfacing, publishing, and binding loosely coupled services on the web. Applications are offered as services both within and across the enterprise with lower development costs [9, 10]. However, still there is a lack of a comprehensive view of the enterprise interactions, within the enterprise architecture, which enables their engineering. In this work, interactions are considered from a conceptual perspective, namely a value added perspective of the work organization and Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Indeed, while work organization and ICT have widespread the distribution, they constitute solutions for adding value, specifically in terms of: (i) architectures for integration such as supply chain, extended enterprise, virtual enterprise and integrated enterprise, (ii) interfaces for enterprise social interactions, and (iii) architecture for cooperating objects such as those in the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Therefore, there is a need for comprehensive conceptualization that leads to a shared, reusable ontology, i.e., ?a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization? [11]. We build on this definition to use conceptualization that refers to a comprehensive, abstract model of the interactions that: ? Constitutes a step towards Web ontology for interactions. ? Guides the engineering methods of the interactions, including processes, representation techniques, languages, and tools. This project presents a typology of the enterprise interactions, as a first step towards ontology for interactions that facilitates their engineering. First, it separates the interaction activities from the business activities. Then, it distinguishes the different types of interactions by their nature, their issues, and their current realizations with ICT. Finally, it conceptualizes them into Web ontology for the purpose of (1) their modeling, design, realization, evaluation, analysis, (2) reusing in a kind reasoning mechanism or query to instantiate a domain ontology specific to any type of the collaborations in Omani organizations. This ontology would first allow a common, shared understanding of the different types of collaborations that happen in any project, then instantiate it for a specific collaborative project, and finally use the Web technologies to interact.
AcronymTTotP
StatusNot started

Keywords

  • Enterprise Interactions
  • Web Intercation Ontology
  • Web 2.0
  • Web Services
  • IoT

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