Inducting Subcontractor Process Ontologies: Challenges, Methods, and Illustrative Results

This paper reports on experience inducting subcontractor process ontologies as part of research on the SEEK: Scalable Extraction of Enterprise Knowledge project at the University of Florida. We briefly review approaches to ontology generation and the application of those approaches to product/process ontologies in the AEC arena as well as process-oriented ontologies generated from a general business perspective. With limited exceptions, existing approaches have not taken an inductive approach. As such, this paper contributes a description of a two-phase inductive methodology to develop firm specific process ontologies. The methodology combines documentation of firm processes and information systems with a synthetically derived base ontology to specify and test a firm specific ontology. Brief findings from application of this methodology are presented. These findings frame description of the challenges eliciting ontological concepts and related data from firms as well as the challenges in representing process knowledge within existing frameworks and tools. Overall, induction is seen as a viable approach to AEC ontology specification, with a useful role in generating detailed ontologies that represent firms' existing processes, procedures, and terminology.