Ontological Considerations for Events & Endurants in Business Models

This literature review examines ontological considerations in business models, focusing on the representation of events and endurants. It reviews the article "Ontological Considerations about the Representation of Events and Endurants in Business Models," which discusses the use of business endurants and events in ontology-driven modeling, particularly within Structural Conceptual Models. The review compares this article with related research on Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and automated annotation of business process models. It further explores the use of domain-specific ontologies to improve the quality of process models and discusses patterns for process model design. The review concludes that Business Process Management follows ontological modeling with two different ontological natures and summarizes the key findings from the reviewed articles, emphasizing the importance of bridging the gap between event-focused and endurant-focused approaches in business process modeling.

Running head: ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE REPRESENTATION OF EVENTS AND ENDURANTS IN
BUSINESS MODELS
Ontological Considerations about the Representation of Events and Endurants in Business Models
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE REPRESENTATION OF EVENTS AND ENDURANTS IN BUSINESS MODELS
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Ontology in the Business Process Model...................................................................................2
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................7
References..................................................................................................................................8

2ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE REPRESENTATION OF EVENTS AND ENDURANTS IN BUSINESS MODELS
Introduction
The purpose of this study is to consider the Ontology that represent the Endurates and
Events based on the business models. The paper will investigate about the ontological nature.
The article chosen for the paper to review is the Ontological Considerations about the
Representation of Events and Endurants in Business Models. In this article, the Business
Endurants and Events are used for the Ontology-Driven Modeling were the Endurants will be
discussed in the Structural Conceptual Models (Guizzardi, Guarino and Almeida 2016). It
will be represented with the possibility for Endurants change. The article will then illustrate
about the events in the process of business models then the Events in the Structural
Conceptual Models. Then in the later section will follow it will then compare the current
article with the related article that are relevant to Business Process Management. Those
articles will also be reviewed and discussed in the paper. Finally, it will conclude with several
approaches that were made to develop a relation between the event and Endurants and
incorporate the structural conceptual model.
Ontology in the Business Process Model
While reviewing the article it was found that there were different disciplines that have
established while dealing with the entities that represent the ontological natures that were
different. In the business process modelling the focus is mostly on the events and in the
structural conceptual modelling the focus is on the objects which is the endurants. The paper
has discussed about the impact with the conceptual models that divide event vs endurant. The
division has to be bridge with the ontological account. The reality of the business could be
more comprehensive with the accounting that provide an ontological difference that was
found in the events and the endurants. A business artifact-centric approaches were made in
the process discipline while event rectification approach was made in the structural

3ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE REPRESENTATION OF EVENTS AND ENDURANTS IN BUSINESS MODELS
conceptual modelling discipline. The paper has proposed a strucutural conceptual modelling
were pattern captures the events. The pattern is the basis that establishes the business process
models which has incorporated the references to the endurant and incorporate the references
of the structural conceptual models with the events. The business endurant and the business
events has two types of Ontology-Driven modelling. For ontology the entities of endurants
present with the whole parts. The essential and accidental properties are both available for
endurants which means that endurants can change qualitatively in order to maintain the
identity. If the accidental properties being considered than their actual properties could have
been different from what they actual are. The kind is defined in the technical sense for the
accidental and essential properties. Kind has principle of identity, persistence and
individualization to define the boundaries and parts the individual have. The Event of the
business process model has applied the UFO Ontology that provide a design for agent-
oriented modelling language.
A similar article was found where the research was about the Unified Foundational
Ontology. Guizzardi, Wagner, Almeida and Guizzardi in its article Towards Ontological
Foundations for Conceptual Modeling: The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) Story
describes about the development of the ontological foundation as a long-term research
program which was basically for the conceptual modelling (Guizzardi et al., 2015). The
background of the paper theoretical discuss about the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO)
ontology foundation and its purpose is to develop the engineering tools, methodologies, and
theories in a more advance way to make the conceptual modelling theoretically sound
discipline. There is a historical context in this paper which describe that UFO briefly
discusses about the stratified organization. There is a discussion on the most successful UFO
application that was the development of the OntoUML which is the conceptual modelling
language. It contains multiple computational and methodological tools that were develop to

4ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE REPRESENTATION OF EVENTS AND ENDURANTS IN BUSINESS MODELS
support the community of OntoUML. The methodologies tools that were used are anti-
patterns and ontological patterns. On the other hand, the computational tools that were used
are pattern-based model construction, formal model verification, anti-pattern detection,
formal model validation, rectification and code generation. In the report various applications
were employed for language and its associated tools. The paper even reflects the actual use of
OntoUML in practice by the OntoUML community which have influenced both language
evolution and UFO core ontological notions. For the developemt of UFO ontology several
thoeries were originated which were consistently put together in area such as cognitive
science, philosophical and linguistics logics, and formal philosophy ontology. From the study
of the paper, it was found that ontology has three different aspects of reality. The first is the
UFO-A, were the ontology of endurants mostly deals with the structural conceptual
modelling aspects. It comprises of theories of Taxonomic of structure and Type of structure.
The second is the UFO-B, were the ontology of Events mostly deals with Event Merelogy,
Temporal Event ordering, Object Participation event, Causation, Change and Dispositions
connection between Events and Endurants. The third is the UFO-C, were ontology of
Intentional and Social Entities were constructed above the UFO-A and UFO-B and it address
the notions of Desires, Beliefs, Intentions, Commitments, Goals, Actions, Social Roles and
Particularized Relational Complexes, and Claims among the others.
The author Riehle, Jannaber, Delfmann, Thomas and Becker in its article
Automatically Annotating Business Process Models with Ontology Concepts at Design-Time
has discussed that the use of vocabulary and consistent labelling style improves the quality of
process model (Riehle et al., 2017). In this article it has been seen that ontologies that are
specific to domain were planned and used so that important knowledge related to process
could be capture. Even in some research ontology concepts have been annotated to the
process models so that the reason could be interpreted about the process model. Since with

5ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE REPRESENTATION OF EVENTS AND ENDURANTS IN BUSINESS MODELS
annotation they could not gain the traction in practice through manual effort. Thus, a
methodology has been provided that is automated and language-independent which uses the
functionalities of labelling assistance. It will annotate and identify the relevant concepts of
ontology in the element of process model were four-steps of the procedural model can be
used. The methodology of automatic annotation of models mainly achieve two things with
ontologies. The first thing is that it will assure the terminological standardisation. The second
thing is that the ontology concepts would automatically related to process models elements
through which it will foster to understand the process elements and with it further enable the
analyses of the process based on ontology and assistance of modelling process in the future.
In the terminological standardization, automatic annotation is standardised in the business
process model. At the design-time, it ensures the terminological standardisation were two
essential things are required. One is the domain thesaurus that has a valid words and the other
is the naming conventions which is Syntactical.
The second key requirement was the Domain ontology that was for automatic
annotation of the process model. Here all the organizational concepts are represented. In such
ontology some mutual relation and elements are related. The elements of ontology are
semantic and the relations are typed semantically. However, the methodology of automatic
annotation has some limitations. Though the methodology provides automatic annotation
from the concept of ontology for the business processes, still limitation is there in the
terminologically standardised ontology. The limitation is further more on the useful need of
ontology. Usefulness depends highly on actual ontology and their related content where all
the necessary information is used. Thus, from this particular paper it can be reviewed that the
author had tried to present the methodology that can automatically annotate the business
process model with the concept of ontology.

6ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE REPRESENTATION OF EVENTS AND ENDURANTS IN BUSINESS MODELS
The third article that has reviewed is about the process of improving the process
modelling Koschmider and Reijers in its article discuss about the business process model use
in the wide area of enterprise applications (Koschmider and Reijers, 2015). During the study
it was found that with the expansion of the business, creation and maintenance concerns are
growing. Efficiency has been boost up for creating the business process model with high-
quality which is the relevant part of the existing models. However, there are limited support
that guides the process modellers for the model content that are appropriate. The paper
contains a content-oriented patterns which has been extracted from process model having
large set. Patterns are derived with a set of proposed algorithms. A demonstration has been
provided in the paper regarding the Domain Process Patterns with regard to the gathered
information of their significant usage that support the process model in order to generate the
new models. During the process, it has set a website accompanying the Domain Process
Pattern. Thus, the author has concluded that modelling language knowledge is not that much
sufficient to build a better process models. It actually requires a profound modelling
experience and practice the modelling language by applying to it. There were several patterns
proposed for the process models design and used the data, resources, control flows or quality
constrain in the workflows.
The last article that has been review is about the PrOnto: An Ontology Driven
Business Process Mining Tool. In this article, Bistarelli, Di Noia, Mongiello and Nocera had
proposed that the tools and techniques of data mining is to identify and extract data from big
data, and from implicit patterns (Bistarelli et al., 2017). This patterns and big data were able
to describe the static or dynamic phenomena. Through this the business processes started to
gain attention more for modern enterprises and organizations by playing some crucial roles.
The solution of performing process mining is to store the data and get know about the
processes. In order to extract the description of the process, the workflow modelling will

7ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE REPRESENTATION OF EVENTS AND ENDURANTS IN BUSINESS MODELS
mine the activities, resources and state transitions. The author has presented a prototyping
tool, PrOnto that can analyse and extract business process knowledge. Through this they
woud be able to disciver the patterns, operations and structures within the events logs. PrOnto
actually supports in decision making for the organization. It has tools that exploits the
encoded knowledge in the domain of ontology that has describe the process model and
provide output with different abstraction levels. The author in its paper had develop ontology
to represent the organization. Thus, the author has concluded in the paper about the PrOnto
prototype system and its process with a UML and XML diagram model.
Conclusion
From all the articles that were reviewed, it has been concluded that the Business
Process Management follows the ontological modelling with two different ontological
natures. In the business process modelling the focus is mostly on the events and in the
structural conceptual modelling the focus is on the objects which is the endurants. The paper
has discussed them both. The article that has been discussed here and the article of Towards
Ontological Foundations for Conceptual Modelling: The Unified Foundational Ontology
(UFO) Story has some sort of similar content about the UFO which has also been discussed
in this paper. Further in the article Automatically Annotating Business Process Models with
Ontology Concepts at Design-Time it uses vocabulary and consistent labelling style to
improve the quality of process model and has proposed a domain-specific ontology to capture
the knowledge related to the process. Finally, in the last review of the article PrOnto: An
Ontology Driven Business Process Mining Tool the author has discussed about the PrOnto
prototype system and its process.

8ONTOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT THE REPRESENTATION OF EVENTS AND ENDURANTS IN BUSINESS MODELS
References
Riehle, D.M., Jannaber, S., Delfmann, P., Thomas, O. and Becker, J., 2017, November.
Automatically Annotating Business Process Models with Ontology Concepts at Design-Time.
In International Conference on Conceptual Modeling(pp. 177-186). Springer, Cham.
Guizzardi, G., Wagner, G., Almeida, J.P.A. and Guizzardi, R.S., 2015. Towards ontological
foundations for conceptual modeling: the unified foundational ontology (UFO) story. Applied
ontology, 10(3-4), pp.259-271.
Koschmider, A. and Reijers, H.A., 2015. Improving the process of process modelling by the
use of domain process patterns. Enterprise Information Systems, 9(1), pp.29-57.
Bistarelli, S., Di Noia, T., Mongiello, M. and Nocera, F., 2017. PrOnto: An Ontology Driven
Business Process Mining Tool. Procedia Computer Science, 112, pp.306-315.
Guizzardi, G., Guarino, N. and Almeida, J.P.A., 2016, September. Ontological considerations
about the representation of events and endurants in business models. In International
Conference on Business Process Management (pp. 20-36). Springer, Cham.