The Open Source Business Management Ontology (BMO)

The Business Management Ontology (BMO) represents an integrated information model, which helps to better align IT with business. It brings together business process design, project management, requirements management, and business performance management (in the form of balanced scorecards). As such, it forms the basis for an integrated, vendor-neutral, Business Management Knowledge Base, from which various artifacts can be generated. While business analysts will be the primary users of the BMO, IT experts will also use it to establish mappings to software-related definitions, such as business objects and Web service descriptions.

Most large organizations are using more than one Business Process Management System (BPMS). Given that business processes will execute in a heterogeneous process execution environment, the need for a correlation approach becomes evident, which goes beyond the present thinking of standards bodies. The BMO addresses this need at the roots.

The BMO requires Protégé beta version 3.0, build 60 or higher, and the OWL plugin (included in the Protégé download package).

Version 1 of the BMO is available for download. The release notes can be viewed online.

A note to downloaders: BMO Version 1 uses the Protégé “:DIRECTED_BINARY_RELATIONSHIP”. Support for this class is broken in newer releases of Protégé OWL. We are in the process of removing dependencies on this class with BMO Version 2.

The Protégé Graph Widget mandates use of directed binary relationships. However, since BPEdit is in development, the grapical Business Process Editor tool will be used to create and manage business processes, and all non-OWL constructs will be removed from the BMO.

The Ontology-Based Business Process Management Vision Statement outlines the vision of third generation business process management and explains why this approach helps to shrink time-to-market cycles of business processes, increase productivity and reduce costs.

The tutorial provides you with an introduction to the BMO. Additional information can be found in the articles section.

What are the major features of the Jenz & Partner Business Management Ontology?

The Business Management Ontology (BMO) allows a Business Analyst to:

• define private business processes
• define public business processes, a.k.a. business collaborations
• define business entities
• define business objects
• define services that implement process activities
• follow the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) for business process and information modeling.

Currently, the comprehensive Jenz & Partner Business Management Ontology encompasses approx. 650 classes.

We offer an in-house workshop: Business Process Management - The Ontology-Based Approach.

Why would one use an Ontology?

Several software design and development artifacts can be generated from a single source.

Beyond this, there are several other convincing reasons (for example, see here ).

Who would use the Open Source Business Management Ontology?

Potential users include:

• Software development departments of mid-sized and large enterprises
• Software firms, Systems integrators etc.