Ontology Based Linkage Between Enterprise Architecture, Processes, and Time

Abstract

Abstract. In an highly dynamic social and business environment time becomes one of the most treasured recourses of companies and individuals. However, there are no many research works devoted to explicit analysis of time issues. Therefore, despite of a large number of enterprise and business process representation and analysis tools, it is still impossible to address time to full extent in systems modeling and analysis. This paper proposes linkage between enterprise architecture, process, and time models to promote development of methods for managing time issues in systems development, maintenance and change management. The linkage roots in Bunge's systems ontology and concerns time ontology edited by Hobbs and Pan. Keywords: Upper ontology · Enterprise architecture · Business process · Time ontology IntroductionTime is one of the most treasured resources in highly dynamic business environment. Time also becomes an important issue in development of different information technology solutions, because their impact on users' time shall be considered. For instance, by development of information systems for administrative purposes the time of administration is saved, however the time of other employees might be misused to such an extent that the new administrative information system causes losses instead of benefits in the company in terms of financial resources, job satisfaction, and ability to serve the customers of the company. On the other hand, often the business is run on the global scale and companies from different time zones have to cooperate in providing services and products to their customers. This means that their business process management systems must be supported by information technology solutions that can easily calculate process parameters taking into consideration time zone differences with respect to the current geographical location of the companies and temporal locations of their employees. We assume that, to ensure good possibility to analyze time issues, it is necessary to develop the following two approaches:• The approach how to model time as one of the sub-models of enterprise architecture.• The approach how to relate time model to other models of the enterprise architecture, especially to the business process model.

Obtaining secure business process models from an enterprise architecture considering security requirements

“…Kirikova et al. (2015) propose a work focused on the need of representing time in enterprise models.…”

Towards a Continuous Temporal Improvement Approach for Real-Time Business Processes

“…The adapted version of the time ontology, as depicted in Fig. 3, incorporates the concept of real-time [13]. This ontology defines time based on three components: time element, linear/nonlinear, and absolute/relative.…”

“…Please note that the figure mentioned can be found in Fig. 3, and the adapted ontology incorporates the real-time concept proposed by Kirikova et al [13].…”

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“…Time first of all is a philosophy term that has many definitions according to all philosophies and scientists, but they all agree about the fact that time is continuous and has an intrinsic order, in other words, events are in progress from past to present then to future. These three categories of time will let us to think more about having a simple classification of time: periods, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years… that will give us time ontology: Figure 2: Basic time ontology [7] Researches are interested by time subject for long time ago; however, there are no many research works on the analysis of time issues, especially real-time process. Jahanianl et al [4] present the formal syntax and semantics of real-time logic, that is a logic for the specification of real-time systems.…”

“…The figure bellow shows the adapted version of the ontology of time; proposed by M. Kirikova et al [7]; including real-time concept: Latency is the first attribute in this definition, as we had already mentioned, real-time is not attainable in his full meaning, so time latency is reliable to the definition of realtime. It can be defined as an interval.…”