2020, Hinkelmann, Knut

Many enterprises face the increasing challenge of sharing and exchanging data from multiple heterogeneous sources. Enterprise Ontologies can be used to effectively address such challenge. In this paper, we present an Enterprise Ontology called ArchiMEO, which is based on an ontological representation of the ArchiMate standard for modeling Enterprise Architectures. ArchiMEO has been extended to cover various application domains such as supply risk management, experience management, workplace learning and business process as a service. Such extensions have successfully proven that our Enterprise Ontology is beneficial for enterprise applications integration purposes.

2016, Hinkelmann, Knut

The paper deals with Next Generation Enterprise Information Systems in the context of Enterprise Engineering. The continuous alignment of business and IT in a rapidly changing environment is a grand challenge for today’s enterprises. The ability to react timeously to continuous and unexpected change is called agility and is an essential quality of the modern enterprise. Being agile has consequences for the engineering of enterprises and enterprise information systems. In this paper a new paradigm for next generation enterprise information systems is proposed, which shifts the development approach of model-driven engineering to continuous alignment of business and IT for the agile enterprise. It is based on a metamodelling approach, which supports both human-interpretable graphical enterprise architecture and machine-interpretable enterprise ontologies. Furthermore, next generation enterprise information systems are described, which embed modelling tools and algorithms for model analysis.

2013, Hinkelmann, Knut

In the APPRIS project an Early-Warning-System (EWS) is developed applying semantic technologies, namely an enterprise ontology and an inference engine, for the assessment of procurement risks. Our approach allows for analyzing internal resources (e.g. ERP and CRM data) and external sources (e.g. entries in the Commercial Register and newspaper reports) to assess known risks, but also for identifying black swans, which hit enterprises with no warning but potentially large impact. For proof of concept we developed a prototype that allows for integrating data from various information sources, of various information types (structured and unstructured), and information quality (assured facts, news); automatic identification, validation and quantification of risks and aggregation of assessment results on several granularity levels. The motivating scenario is derived from three business project partners real requirements for an EWS.

2011, Hinkelmann, Knut

The work presented in this paper explores the potential of leveraging the traces of informal work and collaboration in order to improve business processes over time. As process executions often differ from the original design due to individual preferences, skills or competencies and exceptions, we propose methods to analyse personal preferences of work, such as email communication and personal task execution in a task management application. Outcome of these methods is the detection of internal substructures (subtasks or branches) of activities on the one hand and the recommendation of resources to be used in activities on the other hand, leading to the improvement of business process models. Our first results show that even though human intervention is still required to operationalise these insights it is indeed possible to derive interesting and new insights about business processes from traces of informal work and infer suggestions for process model changes.

2018, Hinkelmann, Knut

Decision makers use models to understand and analyze a situation, to compare alternatives and to find solutions. Additionally, there are systems that support decision makers through data analysis, calculation or simulation. Typically, modeling languages for humans and machine are different from each other. While humans prefer graphical or textual models, machine-interpretable models have to be represented in a formal language. This chapter describes an approach to modeling that is both cognitively adequate for humans and processable by machines. In addition, the approach supports the creation and adaptation of domain-specific modeling languages. A metamodel which is represented as a formal ontology determines the semantics of the modeling language. To create a graphical modeling language, a graphical notation can be added for each class of the ontology. Every time a new modeling element is created during modeling, an instance for the corresponding class is created in the ontology. Thus, models for humans and machines are based on the same internal representation.

2014, Hinkelmann, Knut

2012-04-02T00:00:00Z, Hinkelmann, Knut

Worauf sollte ein Unternehmen achten, wenn es ein DM-System einrichten will? Wichtig ist, dass nicht einfach alle bestehenden Dokumente verwaltet werden, sondern nur die geschäftsrelevanten. Mit einer Analyse der Geschäftsprozesse kann eine Firma den Aufwand für das Management überflüssiger Dokumente eliminieren und Kosten einsparen.

2016-03-28, Hinkelmann, Knut

The accessibility of project knowledge obtained from experiences is an important and crucial issue in enterprises. This information need about project knowledge can be different from one person to another depending on the different roles he or she has. Therefore, a new ontology-based case-based reasoning (OBCBR) approach that utilises an enterprise ontology is introduced in this article to improve the accessibility of this project knowledge. Utilising an enterprise ontology improves the case-based reasoning (CBR) system through the systematic inclusion of enterprise-specific knowledge. This enterprise-specific knowledge is captured using the overall structure given by the enterprise ontology named ArchiMEO, which is a partial ontological realisation of the enterprise architecture framework (EAF) ArchiMate. This ontological representation, containing historical cases and specific enterprise domain knowledge, is applied in a new OBCBR approach. To support the different information needs of different stakeholders, this OBCBR approach has been built in such a way that different views, viewpoints, concerns and stakeholders can be considered. This is realised using a case viewpoint model derived from the ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 standard. The introduced approach was implemented as a demonstrator and evaluated using an application case that has been elicited from a business partner in the Swiss research project.

2013-11, Hinkelmann, Knut

In this paper we show how semantic metadata – derived from the enterprise architecture description - can improve both the exploitation of information in the operative business and the continuous alignment of information systems with the business. ArchiMEO, a formal representation of the ArchiMate framework, was applied to model selected parts of a large Swiss company, including metadata of concrete information objects stored in various applications. The evaluation of our approach clearly gave evidence that linking an enterprise ontology with operational databases is beneficiary: it provides an integrated view and management of enterprise entities spread over various data stores, represented in different ways and levels of granularity. Furthermore, because of its inference capabilities, when used as metadata encoding scheme an enterprise ontology can provide context-sensitive access to relevant information.

2011-03-21T00:00:00Z, Hinkelmann, Knut

Organizational agility is a key challenge in today's business world. The Knowledge-Intensive Service Support approach tackles agility by combining process modeling and business rules. In the paper at hand, we present five approaches of process mining that could further increase the agility of processes by improving an existing process model.