The Business Model Ontology - a proposition in a design ... - HEC

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Knowledge of the Problem Domain Ushold and Gruninger (1996): • poor communication within and between people and their organization. • difficulties in identifying the requirements and the specification of IT systems. • poor inter-operability. • poor use of potential re-use and sharing. • as a consequence of the above much effort is wasted in re-inventing the wheel. Concretely, the effort to define ontologies in business has taken two different forms. Firstly, there are those ontologies that belong in the category of the so-called enterprise ontologies that describe the concepts related to the nature and structure of the business enterprise. Secondly, there are the transaction related ontologies, essentially used in e-business and aimed at specifying information in electronic business transactions in order to improve and automate these transactions (Fensel 2001). For the purpose of this thesis we will shortly survey the efforts in the former category. These are enterprise models with the goal of being a computational representation of the structure, activities, processes, information, resources, people, behavior, goals and constraints of a business, government, or other enterprise (Fox and Grüninger 1997). 3.2.1 Business Engineering Model (BEM) This model represents a set of formalisms to specify the core metadata found in the operational and data warehousing environment of enterprises, in order to support interoperability among them (Bertolazzi, Krusich et al. 2001). The concepts are described in UML. The model captures information on business goals, the organization, the business processes and business rules. 3.2.2 The Edinburgh Enterprise Ontology The work of the Edinburgh Group is aimed at proposing an enterprise ontology (Ushold, King et al. 1997), i.e. a set of carefully defined concepts that are widely used for describing enterprises in general and that can serve as a stable basis for specifying software requirements (Bertolazzi, Krusich et al. 2001). The group has developed tools for modeling enterprises and processes. The Enterprise Ontology is proposed as a way to communicate, integrate and represent in a unique way the various aspects of an enterprise. The Enterprise Ontology is represented in an informal way (text version) and in a semi-formal way (Ontolingua). The ontology first presents natural language definitions for all the terms, starting with the foundational concepts, such as entity, relationship and actors (i.e. the metaontology). These are then used to define the main body of terms, which are divided into four subject areas (Ushold, King et al. 1997), namely: • Activities • Organization • Strategy • Marketing 3.2.3 The Toronto Virtual Enterprise (TOVE) The Toronto Virtual Enterprise aims at delivering a model that supports model-driven enterprise design, analysis and operation (Fox and Gruninger 1998). This project has formally defined a set of concepts that are general enough to allow their use in different applications. The concepts, similarly to the Enterprise Ontology, are grouped into thematic sections. For each concept, properties and relations are defined. However, unlike the semi-formal Enterprise Ontology, the Toronto Virtual Enterprise is rigorously formal. In other words, it has meticulously defined terms with formal semantics, theorems and proofs of such properties as soundness and completeness (Ushold and Gruninger 1996). Basically, the generic, reusable enterprise data model has the following characteristics (TOVE 2002). It: • provides a shared terminology for the enterprise that each agent can jointly understand and use, 40
The Business Model Ontology - a proposition in a design science approach • defines the meaning of each term (i.e. semantics) in a precise and as unambiguous manner as possible, • implements the semantics in a set of axioms that will enable Toronto Virtual Enterprise to automatically deduce the answer to many "common sense" questions about the enterprise, and • defines a symbology for depicting a term or the concept constructed thereof in a graphical context. 3.2.4 Enterprise Ontologies versus Business Model Ontology In this dissertation I pick up the idea of building a business ontology aiming at improving understanding, communication and flexibility just as do the Enterprise Ontology and the Toronto Virtual Enterprise. But while these overall objectives might seem quite similar, the domain and content of the ontology delivered in the following chapters of this dissertation is substantially different. While the Enterprise Ontology and the Toronto Virtual Enterprise focus essentially on structural aspects of business I aim at formalizing business concepts in the business model domain. My goal is to provide a semi-formal ontology for business models by following Ushold and Gruninger's (1996) guidelines for building an ontology: • Capturing & coding the ontology: Identify the key concepts and relationships in the domain of interest and produce unambiguous text definitions of them. • Evaluating the ontology: Test the internal and external consistency of the ontology. • Documenting the ontology: Meticulously document the provided ontology. 41
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