Fig. 3 shows the proposed process-centered enterprise ontology,
which represents major enterprise concepts and the relationships
between them in a process-centered way. Since the ‘process’
concept is the core element of the process-centered enterprise
structure, all domain concepts are related to the ‘process’ concept,
directly and indirectly, as is shown in the following ontology. In a
business environment, a customer buys a number of products. For
the customer, a process consumes parts and finally produces the
products while using resources. A participant handles the process
and collaborates with team members in order to successfully produce
products. A supplier supplies parts, products and/or resources
to an enterprise.
When new instance data is created about a specific concept
such as a new product, this data is registered into an ontology
repository. The common attributes of these instances are ID, name,
description, data type and length. Afterwards, during the project
registration stage, the relationship is connected between a project
(i.e., an instance of a process) and the remaining concepts. Therefore,
during process execution, participants can retrieve relevant
knowledge objects by using only the project name or ID.