MoKi: The Enterprise Modelling Wiki

Abstract:

• • Enterprise modelling focuses on the construction of a structured description, the so-called enterprise model, which represents aspects relevant to the activity of an enterprise.

  • Although it has become clearer recently that enterprise modelling is a collaborative activity, involving a large number of people, most of the enterprise modelling tools still only support very limited degrees of collaboration.

  • Within this contribution we describe a tool for enterprise modelling, called MoKi (MOdelling wiKI), which supports agile collaboration between all di.erent actors involved in the enterprise modelling activities.

  • MoKi is based on a Semantic Wiki and enables actors with di.erent expertise to develop an enterprise model not only using structural (formal) descriptions but also adopting more informal and semi-formal descriptions of knowledge.

Research Background: Enterprise Modelling

• • According to [1], "an enterprise model" is a computational representation of the structure, activities, processes, information, resources, people, behavior, goals, and constraints of a business, government, or other enterprise".

  • We refer to enterprise modelling as the process of creating an enterprise model.

  • Often, an enterprise model focuses on the description of two speci.c aspects of an enterprise:

    • (i) its processes and activities, and / or

    • (ii) the business domain within which the enterprise operates.

  • Additionally, other aspects of an enterprise, like goals, human resources, organisational structure and roles etc. may also be important assets to be described in an enterprise model.

  • This is due to the central role that enterprise models are playing in the development of a large number of applications, including Internet and (Semantic) Web based applications.

  • Building an enterprise model requires a number of skills.

  • These skills span from knowing the di.erent aspects that have to be described in the models, to having the ability of encoding such knowledge into formal statements, to having the ability of integrating different aspects, such as structure, activities, processes, information, resources, people, behavior, goals, and constraints into a uniform and coherent vision.

  • Given the complexity of enterprise modelling, it is unrealistic to assume that all the actors possess all the skills above.

  • For instance di.erent actors may have very different expertise in encoding some content into formal languages, or may know only of specific aspects of an enterprise.

  • For this reason, enterprise modelling is inherently a collaborative activity, performed by different actors with different know-how and technical skills.

  • To support these di.erent actors we foresee a system in which content can be represented at different degrees of formality.

  • This will allow domain experts to create, review and modify models at a rather informal/human intelligible level and knowledge engineers to check the quality of the formal definitions and their correspondence with the informal parts they intend to represent.

  • In order not to increase the overhead of human work, translation between di.erent levels of formality should be as much automatised as possible.

  • To support a coherent development and integration of the di.erent components of the enterprise model we also foresee a tool in which all the relevant aspects of an enterprise can be modelled in a collaborative and cooperative manner, thus exploiting the synergy of \having to think the same thing out only once".

  • To meet this vision we are developing MoKi (Modelling Wiki), a collaborative tool that:

    • (i) supports access to the enterprise model at different levels of formality (informal, semi-formal and formal),

    • (ii) supports integrated modelling of several aspects of an enterprise, and

    • (iii) ensures a coherent development of the formal part.

  • In the current implementation of MoKi , we focus on an enterprise model describing the domain, the processes and the competencies of an enterprise.

  • The choice of these aspects was originally motivated by the EU-project APOSDLE described in Section 3.

Screen-shots:

Conclusions:

• • In this demonstration we have presented a new collaborative tool, called MoKi , to support the creation of integrated enterprise models.

  • MoKi supports collaboration in the modelling activities among people with di.erent skills and levels of expertise.

  • We are currently improving the tool in several directions, which span from including support for the modelling of competencies, improving support for processes modelling and processes visualization, and improving the preservation of the alignment between the content described in MoKi pages and the formal models created.