Scope

An ontology is a list of the possible categories in a specific domain and the relationships among those categories.  An enterprise ontology explains the types entities or classes you would expect to see in a specific business process.  Example BP classes might include entities like this: order, shipment, invoice, payment, buyer, seller, role, location, goods, services, etc. Enterprise ontologies also explain the classes needed to integrate with internal (ERP) business services.

REA (resource-event-agent) is an enterprise ontology adopted from the ISO Open-edi series of specifications, most specifically ISO/IEC FDIS 15944-4. Information Technology-Business Operational View -- Part 4: Business Transaction Scenarios -- Accounting and Economic Ontology (February 2007).

The goal of this specialization module is to provide two types of specific guidance to UMM users as they develop their collaboration models:

• an ontology-based methodology for developing the class diagrams and state machine life cycles for business entities within the Business Entity View of the UMM Business Requirements View.
• an ontology-based methodology for developing activity diagrams and collections of shared business entity state machines necessary for orchestrating the business activities within the Business Process View of the UMM Business Requirements View. 

The UMM guidance provided in this specialization module is informative or non-normative, aimed at providing assistance to potential UMM clients in adapting their own semantic models to the UMM.  Later extensions of this project may attempt to provide more integrated guidance within the UMM 2.0 project.

Contacts & Members

Project Chair William Mc Carthy mccarthy@bus.msu.edu Lead Editor TBD

Group: BPWG-REA Gunther Stuhec (gunther.stuhec) gunther.stuhec@sap.com Please log in first.