A New Approach to Develop Collaborative Ontology based BPMN Case Study: Generation of Fiscal Code

Published Online February 2020 in MECS DOI: 10.5815/ijitcs.2020.01.01

• I.    Introduction

  According to Enterprise Business Collaboration 2018 Survey Report [1], the use of collaboration tools and platforms highly increased. Main applications on digital platform being of 78% for knowledge management and 58 % for Office Applications. Influencing performance factors of the digital platform are (Corporate Culture 65,

User adoption 64%, Budget 38%).

Knowledge Management (KM) is one of the critical success of collaborative tools and platforms; it improves knowledge sharing and collaborative work, especially between enterprises or organizations due to the new extended environment of enterprises [2].

The development and implementation of a collaborative platform is a difficult problem. Indeed, for these types of projects, interoperability is one of the most challenging requirements to ensure. Amongst many definitions, interoperability is defined as the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged [ 3].

For supporting collaborative platforms, there is different semantic technologies, in our case we are interested in ontologies, specifically a collaborative ontology. Developing a collaborative ontology that can be used by a collaborative platform has highlighted several challenges and research questions: which techniques can be used for knowledge gathering to populate the ontology? How to take into consideration the business needs of the partners of the collaboration? How to verify the collaborative ontology?

We carried out a literature review of the various works responding to our problem; it allowed us to identify different approaches concerning using ontologies to develop a collaborative platform and collaborative ontology engineering. Several papers in the literature focus on gathering knowledge using frameworks and developing global collaborative ontologies, other works tried to enrich the previous works by adding dynamic concepts to the resulting ontologies, while others proposed a more generic approach allowing a meta modelization of the inter-organizational collaborative process. Indeed, some of them proposed a variety of methodologies, methods, and techniques for developing collaborative ontology. The best work from our perspective is the work that focused on the different methodologies for developing collaborative ontologies.

In this paper, we have relied on the analysis of the existing literature, and we have noticed several gaps, such as the multiples perspectives of enrichment of the collaborative ontology, the collaborative process modeling was not in a collaborative manner with the intervention of the different actors of the collaboration. The proposed methodologies, for collaborative ontology engineering, do not accurately identify each participant’s contribution, and there are no methods to verify the resulting collaborative ontology.

The purpose of the paper is to tackle the above gaps. Our objective is to develop a collaborative ontology applicable to any collaborative situation without the need for enrichment perspectives. We want to base the construction of the collaborative ontology on a business model already existing in the information system of the collaborative partners to be sure to identify the business needs of each partner, to design this model in a collaborative way and use a method to verify the resulting collaborative ontology.

This paper is organized into five sections. The second section deals with the literature review. The third is about the approach that we proposed for developing a collaborative ontology. The fourth section deals with the case studied, the generation of fiscal code, to which our prototype was applied, and the results achieved. The fifth section presents the conclusion and perspectives of this work.

• II.    Literature Review

We can roughly classify the literature related to this paper into three main groups: works that introduced, for the first time, the semantic level, represented by ontologies, to collaborative platforms. Works that proposed to enrich the ontology resulting from the work of the first group, by metamodeling and verifying the business process resulting from the transformation of this ontology and, finally works dealing with collaborative ontology engineering.

Knowledge is a more abstract level of a collaborative information system; they represent the business level. The work of [4] defined a knowledge-based system (Kbs), to produce a valid collaborative business process model to be executed within a collaborative platform. A collaborative ontology-based approach has been developed for dealing with knowledge representation and reasoning, which is the core of the Kbs. The originality of this work is the introduction of the notion of collaborative ontology in the development of collaborative platforms, but the resulting ontology needed some enrichment perspectives because of the lack of some concepts concerning partners. This work forms the basis of our approach, but without the need  for enrichment perspectives.