Universal Enterprise Adaptive Object Model: A Semantic Web‐Based Implementation of Organizational Self‐Awareness

• Published date: 01 January 2015
• Author: David Aveiro,Duarte Pinto
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/isaf.1363
• Date: 01 January 2015

UNIVERSAL ENTERPRISE ADAPTIVE OBJECT MODEL: A

SEMANTIC WEB-BASED IMPLEMENTATION OF

ORGANIZATIONAL SELF-AWARENESS

DAVID AVEIRO

a,b,c

*AND DUARTE PINTO

a

a

Exact Sciences and Engineering Centre, University of Madeira, Caminho da Penteada, Funchal, Portugal

b

Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Caminho da Penteada, Funchal, Portugal

c

Center for Organizational Design and Engineering, INESC-INOV, Lisbon, Portugal

SUMMARY

In this paper we present a novel conceptual model that systematizes the integrated management and adaptation of:

(1) enterprise models, (2) their representations, (3) their underlying meta-models (i.e. their abstract syntax) and

(4) the representation rules (i.e. concrete syntax for the respective models). All this for different modelling

languages and also different versions of these languages. Thanks to our original use of the adaptive object model

and type square patterns—normally applied in the context of software engineering, but here applied for enterprise

engineering—we manage to provide a strong conceptual foundation for the development of software tools that

allow a precise and coherent specification of models and their evolution and also of meta-models and their evolu-

tion. We also present a prototype of such a tool currently being developed to enable collaborative enterprise

ontology model management using the Semantic MediaWiki as a base framework. This solution is solidly

grounded on the theoretical foundations of organizational self-awareness and Ψ-theory of enterprise ontology

and is a valuable contribution to facilitate general and distributed enterprise model management and also concrete

and abstract syntax specification (i.e. the specification of a language’s meta-model). This allows flexibility and ease

of use in creation and adaptation of organizational models and also the use of semantic queries to detect and inform

users on any violation of meta-model rules. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: enterprise engineering; model; meta-model; abstract syntax; concrete syntax; adaptive object model;

type square; wiki; Semantic Web; DEMO

1. INTRODUCTION

A considerable amount of time is lost in enterprises on the handling of unexpected exceptions causing

dysfunctions. Exception handling can sometimes take nearly half of the total working time, and the

handling of, and recovering from, exceptions is expensive (Saastamoinen & White, 1995). On the other

hand, current enterprise engineering (EE) approaches lack the concepts and methods for a continuous

update of organizational models, so that these are always up to date and availableas a more useful input

for the process of constant change of organizational reality and decisions on possible modification

choices. It seems that the root problem is an absence of concepts and methods for the explicit capture

and management of information of exceptions and their handling. This includes the design and

operationalization of organization artefacts (OAs)—for example, actor role pizza deliverer—that solve

dysfunctions caused. Not immediately capturing this handling and the consequent resulting

* Correspondence to: David Aveiro, Exact Sciences and Engineering Centre, University of Madeira, Caminho da Penteada,

Funchal, Portugal. E-mail: daveiro@uma.pt

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS IN ACCOUNTING, FINANCE AND MANAGEMENT

Intell. Sys. Acc. Fin. Mgmt. 22,3–28(2015)

Published online 9 February 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/isaf.1363

modifications in reality and the respective models will result in that, as time passes, the organization

will be less aware of itself than it should be when facing the need of future change due to other unex-

pected exceptions.

The lack of awareness of organizational reality has been addressed with the coining of the concept of

‘organizational self-awareness’(OSA), discussed in Magalhaes et al. (2007) and Zacarias et al. (2007).

OSA stresses the importance and need of continuously available, coherent, updated and updateable

models of organizational reality. We ground our research in a particular organizational engineering ap-

proach, namely Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO; Dietz, 2006). Our

research is heavily based on DEMO, so, while proceeding, the reader who is unfamiliar with this meth-

odology is advised to also consult Dietz (2006) or Dietz and Albani (2005) or other publications at

www.demo.nl. From several approaches to support EE being proposed, DEMO seems to be one of

the most coherent, comprehensive, consistent and concise (Dietz, 2006). It has shown to be useful in

a number of applications, from small to large-scale organizations—for example, see Dietz and Albani

(2005) and Op’t Land (2008: 39). Nevertheless, DEMO suffers from the shortcomings referred to ear-

lier and also present in most modelling languages and associated methods. Namely, DEMO models

have mostly been used to devise blueprints to serve as instruments for discussion of broader scale or-

ganizational change or development/change of IT systems (Op’t Land, 2008: 58) and do not, yet, pro-

vide modelling constructs and a method for a continuous update of its models as reality changes.

Current software tools supporting DEMO also suffer from the same shortcoming.

With our research work we aim to facilitate distributed awareness of organizational reality and also

coordinated distributed change of models of the enterprise’s reality using adequate methods and soft-

ware tools as a support. Besides the problem of collective model distribution and update we also face

the problem of meta-model evolution (new versions of modelling languages) and model migration. To

address these problems, in our tool development efforts a necessity arose of allowing a precise way of

conceptualizing and implementing the separation of the following three concerns: (1) reality;

(2) models of reality; and (3) their representations. Besides this, such conceptualization should also

provide adequate flexibility for model and meta-model evolution. In Section 2 we explore current

state-of-the-art notions of central concepts in our research such as ontology, system, model, meta-

model, abstract and concrete syntax and others. We also do a brief analysis of state-of-the-art tools that

support the organizational engineering method we focus on. Section 3 includes the major contribution

of our work: a thorough and powerful conceptualization that integrates all modelling aspects referred

to above. In Section 4 we present our current software tool prototype that supports our conceptualiza-

tion and method to support OSA. Section 5 contains our final considerations and aspects to be ex-

plored in future work.

2. STATE-OF-THE ART REVIEW

2.1. Ontological Notions

We adopt the ontological system definition from Dietz (2008) (citing Bunge, 1979), which concerns the

construction and operation of a system. The corresponding type of model is the white-box model,

which is a direct conceptualization of the ontological system definition presented next. Something is

a system if and only if it has the following properties: (1) composition—a set of elements of some cat-

egory (physical, biological, social, chemical, etc.); (2) environment—a set of elements of the same cat-

egory, where the composition and the environment are disjoint; (3) structure—a set of influencing

4D. AVEIRO AND D.PINTO

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Intell. Sys. Acc. Fin. Mgmt., 22,3–28 (2015)

DOI: 10.1002/isaf