Use of Ontologies as Representation Support of Workflows Oriented to Administrative Management

One of the applications of workflow systems is the management of administrative processes characterized by the transmission of information elements among users of an organization. Tasks contained in these processes are carried out by users responsible for confirming, modifying or adding information throughout. These processes need to be defined in workflow management systems in which all the elements are perfectly identified and are easily adaptable to changes that may arise in the sequences of tasks, in the users involved or in the data transmitted from one task to another. For this kind of processes is easier to reuse those represented in ontologies. On one hand, existing ontologies for representing some domain elements can be reused. At the same time, ontologies have an excellent expressive capacity to define tasks, their relationships and the flow control among them with precision. This paper proposes a complete model, together with the necessary software tools, for tackling this issue.

álvaro E. PrietoEmail:

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álvaro E. Prieto   is a teaching/research assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Extremadura, Spain. He has an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Extremadura (2000). His Ph.D. research addresses the use of ontologies in workflows. He is currently involved in various national and regional R&D&I projects. Adolfo Lozano-Tello   is teaching/research assistant professor of Computer Science Department at University of Extremadura, Spain. He is a Ph.D. (2002) with a special prize of extraordinary thesis about selection of ontologies for software applications. He has published more than 50 papers on the above issues on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering.