Alvaro E. Prieto

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.

Semantic Comparison of Ontologies Based on WordNet

The increasing use of ontologies in recent years has led to much of the information represented in them appear in differently expressed ways. When integration processes of ontologies are required within the same domain, problems arise in the correspondence between the terms that appear in ontologies involved in the process. To solve this problem, this article presents a method, which provides the user with a value of similarity between the terms of two ontologies to assist in the integration process. The method is based on the use of the lexical database defined by WordNet and the application of semantic similarity algorithms. It also introduces a software tool that carries out the implementation of this method.

OntoMetaWorkflow: an ontology for representing data and users in workflows

Administrative processes are a type of business process commonly used in public institutions and large companies. These processes are generally characterized by involving the submission of some type of application form. This form must be considered at different stages by different users who need to handle current information of a dossier in order to provide new data in each activity until the end of the process. These processes are frequently reused because there are often similar processes within the organizations. The classification of the data managed by the activities and the categorization of the different users involved in every activity has great importance in these processes. The use of ontologies for modeling the workflows of administrative processes can provide significant improvements in this reuse process. In this paper, we describe OntoMetaWorkflow, a generic ontology to represent canonical workflow terms in the domain of administrative processes, and the methods that use it.

Representation of science publications in open linked data from ORCID codes using ontologies to support a portal of scientific publications

The ORCID code is becoming the unique identifier for assigning authorship to scientific publications. This article describes the processes for representing, in an open — linked data format, the scientific publications of researchers of an university from the ORCID servers. Having the information in this way, there is an enormous potential to make accurate and interesting queries, and generate graphs from these data.

A Method for Systematic Adaptation and Synchronization of Healthcare Processes

International organizations, as the World Health Organization (WHO), are constantly defining new healthcare protocols and procedures, as well as modifying previously adopted ones. As a result, most health institutions have to adapt continuously their workflows and information systems in order to be aligned with international standards. This problem, called Hierarchical Adaptation Problem, is common in hierarchical domains that use administrative workflows. It also implies establishing the change propagation methods to maintain the consistency among the different levels when the original workflow is changed. To solve this problem, this work introduces the Hierarchical Adaptation Method. A method based on ontologies to define the rules that must be satisfied by a generic workflow to be considered adaptable to different application cases and the rules that must be satisfied by its adapted versions. Moreover, it provides the operations to facilitate both adaptation of workflows and propagation of changes.

Assisted searches for open data portals

Increasingly, public administrations and some companies are providing your data in reusable formats. Those that choose to offer the highest quality data reuse usually have a SPARQL access point so that applications that use them can make queries directly. Instead, citizens do not have that option because they generally do not know the SPARQL language. This article proposes a model to generate SPARQL queries against a opendata server from intuitively selectable options from a Web form, providing usefulness to the open data portals.

Workflow Hierarchical Adaptation Method Using Ontologies

Administrative processes are a type of business process frequently used at civil services and large companies with hierarchical organizations. The workflows of these processes are often defined generically in the level of management or governance of the organization. These workflows must be specialized in the lower levels of the organization hierarchy before they can be used. In addition, any change in the generic workflows must be also propagated to the lower levels. Traditional approaches of workflow specialization do not provide a complete solution to these issues. However, some strategies of ontology evolution can be adapted to solve these problems. In this paper we propose a method that combines approaches of both research areas called Workflow Hierarchical Adaptation Method. This method can be applied to workflows defined in ontologies. Thus, a model and tools for defining and managing workflows based on ontologies are also described in this paper.