Other details about property are out of the scope of this work but will be found in the
BPMN specification. Here we want to underline all the BPMN complexity and the
different level of detail that composes this notation; thanks to this different details
level it is possible to use the same notation both for business and for IT people.
What.is.Ontology?
The traditional philosophic concept of ontology, that is, ???a systematic explanation of
being,??? has been inherited in the artificial intelligence (AI) with several definitions.
In the AI idea, ontology is the study of something that exists or may exist in some
domain; ontology may be defined as terms linked together to define a structure in
a well-defined application domain.
The definition of ontology near to the IT aspect is given by Gruber (1993, pp. 199-
220): ???ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization.???
The concept of conceptualization is the abstraction of some concept through the
definition of some peculiar characteristic; the term explicit is related to the fact that
Pa ano and Gu do
Copyright ?© 2007, Idea Group Inc.
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