There has been a marked increase in the application of ontologies for the purposes of analysing modelling grammars. For example, a literature review identified more than 25 papers that applied the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology for the analysis of modelling grammars such as ER (e.g. Wand and Weber, 1989; Wand and Weber, 1993; Wand and Weber, 1995), OMT, UML (e.g. Burton-Jones and Meso, 2002; Opdahl and Henderson-Sellers, 2002; Shanks et al., 2002), Petri-Nets, ARIS (e.g. Green and Rosemann, 2000; Green and Rosemann, 2002; Rosemann and Green, 2002) and Web Services standards such as ebXML, BPEL4WS, BPML or WSCI (e.g. van der Aalst et al., 2002; Wohed et al., 2002; Green et al., 2003). In general, selected ontologies and their interpretations, from an information systems viewpoint, are reasonably advanced. However, the actual process of conducting an ontological analysis is still rather immature. At this stage, the process is focused on the identification of the cardinality of the relationships between corresponding elements in the ontology and the modelling grammar under analysis. In our analysis, eight shortcomings of the current ontological analysis process have been identified and categorised into issues related to the input, process and output of the analysis.
This paper has proposed to further enhance the current process of ontological analysis. The objectives of such a method are:
to provide guidance for researchers who are interested in conducting ontological analyses;
to add rigour to the entire process and reduce the dependence on subjective interpretations of the involved researchers, and
to increase the credibility of the ontological analysis and its results.
Examples from our ontological analyses of ARIS and various Web Services standards have been used to exemplify this method. As a consequence, we hope the more rigorous process that has been presented here will increase the overall acceptance of using ontologies for the analysis, comparison and engineering of various modelling grammars.