Ontologies supporting business process re-engineering

The paper motivates the ontologies for the automation of a Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) methodology (in particular, for the continuous and incremental improvement of the business processes using TQM - Total Quality Management). It describes and exemplifies an upper-level ontology with linguistic features and its application to three particular ontologies: BPR, domain and communication ontology. The main benefits from ontologies for BPR are: (1) they facilitate the (virtual) team work by providing a common vocabulary and understanding, (2) the ontological axioms support the organization and formalization of the BPR specific knowledge, as well as the inferences upon it, (3) an upper-level ontology helps for the integration of BPR and domain specific information and knowledge.