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Outcomes from Chapter 4 are centred on the evolvement of the Semantic Discovery Lifecycle’s five phases and steps, the development of business process models and the generalised process models of the financial services domain. Figure 5-1 illustrates the first version of SDL phases, steps and its associated artefacts in iteration one.

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Figure 5-1: First Version of SDL Phases, Steps and Associated Artefacts In this chapter the researcher was able to move the research methodology forward focusing on: (a) evolving the classification of SDL phases and steps based on the previous knowledge and learning acquired from iteration one, (b) defining automated generalisation of business process ontology models based on running a reasoner for inferencing, and (c) developing the ontological definition of business processes based on the object paradigm. This iteration was motivated by the thinking that ontologies, formalised semantic models of real world systems or domains, are well suited to uncover and represent the underlying meaning of business processes. Additional knowledge appears more opportunistic when observing the discovery lifecycle and ontology together, with greater opportunity for effectiveness gains as knowledge increments are made. Reasons behind undertaking these changes in the second version of SDL are summarised as follows:

• The second version of SDL will clearly benefit from automation, as the first version of SDL process is highly manual and time-consuming.

• Improve the flow of the first version of SDL through re-distributing the steps among the phases and focus on specialisation of process types. Thus, the second version of SDL has the following phases: Extract and Model processes (phase 1), Interpret and

S te ps Financial Legacy Assets Financial Segments BP Models Similar Types BP models

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Formalise processes (Phase 2), Generalise processes (Phase 3) and Document the Patterns (Phase 4).

• Extracted BP terms are mapped to BPMN elements as a way of facilitating visualisation of the processes. In iteration one Ericksson and Penker (2000) non- standard process terms were adopted.

• For the Semantic Analysis phase the definition of the business process ontology model for Interpreting business processes and its formalisation in Protégé, enables consistency checking and automated classification of processes. Consistency amongst Business Process Ontology (BPO) model elements is highly important since incompatibility in their definition would most likely have negative effects on the whole process definition and overlap among the terms, i.e. verify whether there are any contradictions in the business process ontology.

• The Semantic Enhancement phase uses the reasoner to classify the business process models and identify inconsistencies, inferred subclass relations, and inferred equivalencies. Thus, for generalising business processes, reasoners can be used to derive inferences from the asserted processes, e.g. infer whether a particular process in an ontology is a sub-process of another, or whether particular activities, event or individuals in an ontology belongs to a specific class.

Figure 5-2 shows how SDL was refined in this iteration. From Figure 5-2 it can be noticed that in iteration two the steps of Procurement and Organisation of Legacy Assets

(POLA), Segmentation of Legacy Assets (SLA), and Reverse Engineering of BP Models

have been grouped and classified respectively as steps 1, 2 and 3 for a new phase called

Preparation of Legacy Assets (PLA), which represents the first phase of the refined

Semantic Discovery Lifecycle. It is worth mentioning that the practicalities of each step have not been changed.

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Figure 5-2: Second Version of SDL Phases and Steps for this Iteration The refined phases of the second version of SDL are now defined as follows:

Phase 1: Preparation of Legacy Assets

This provides SDL with organisational legacy assets that demonstrate the existence of certain types of models as well as their generalised recurrence across multiple organisations. Also during this phase business process models are extracted from the legacy assets. These models are typical process flow diagrams such as BPMN diagrams.

In Figure 5-2 only Interpretation takes place in the Semantic Analysis of BP Models, which represents the second phase of SDL.

Phase 2: Semantic Analysis of BP Models.

This phase along with the following represents the core of SDL. The elements of the process diagrams generated in phase one are semantically interpreted in order to derive more precise ontological models of the processes themselves and semantically richer than its predecessors. Interpretation identifies the business objects that the process

Interpretation Formalisation S te ps Generalisation S te ps Step

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commits to existing. Interpretation explicitly makes the business processes as much as possible close to real world objects, which ensures the grounding of the patterns to real world behaviour. For this phase the object paradigm (Partridge, 1996) provides a sound ontological foundation. Explanation for the ontological definition of business processes can be found in Section 5.3.

In Figure 5-2 only Generalisation of Ontology BP models takes part in the Semantic

Enhancement of Ontology BP Models, which represents the third phase of SDL.

Phase 3: Semantic Enhancement of BP Models (SE).

This phase takes the ontological models created in SA and aims at generalising them to existing patterns or to newly developed patterns. Generalisation is an abstraction principle that allows defining an ontological model as a refinement of other ontological models. It sees a relationship between a general and specific model where the specific ontology model contains all the activities of the general model and more.

Phase 4: Pattern Documentation

Patterns Documentation is the fourth and last phase of SDL. Documentation plays an

important role, bringing people from different groups together to negotiate and coordinate common practice as it plays a central role for global communication.