Business Semantics as an Interface between Enterprise Information Management and the Web of Data: A Case Study in the Flemish Public Administration

Conceptual modeling captures descriptions of business entities in terms of their attributes and relations with other business entities. When those descriptions are needed for interoperability tasks between two or more autonomously developed information systems ranging from Web of Data with no a priori known purposes for the data to Enterprise Information Management in which organizations agree on (strict) rules to ensure proper business, those descriptions are often captured in a shared formal specification called an ontology. We present the method Business Semantics Management (BSM), a fact-oriented approach to knowledge modeling grounded in natural language. We first show how fact-oriented approaches differ from approaches in terms of, amongst others, expressiveness, complexity, and decidability and how this formalism is easier for users to render their knowledge. We then explain the different processes in BSM and how the tool suite supports those processes. Finally, we show how the ontologies can be transformed into other formalisms suitable for particular interoperability tasks. All the processes and examples will be taken from industry cases throughout the lecture.