Empowering the business user

1. Empowering the business user

2. Fact sheet • 3 years Integrating Project • FP7, ICT call 3, theme 4.2 • Current status: operation • Grant agreement: FP7 231875 • Started: 1 January 2009 • Duration: 36 months • Overall budget: >8 M€ • Max. funding: 5.4 M€ • Effort: 644 person.months (~18 FTE) • Consortium • Vendors: ILOG + Ontoprise • SBVR consultants: PNA (+ John Hall) • Use cases: Arcelor Mittal + Audi • Technology center: CTIC • Academics: TU Vienna + FU. Bozen/Bolzano + U. Paris 13 • Coordinator: Christian de Sainte Marie (ILOG)

3. Today’s practice IT application developper + Business user verbalize Business user design Business vocabulary Business Rules BOM XOM Execute IT application developer Application design

4. ONTORULE’s vision IT IT IT IT IT IT Execute Vocabulary + Ontology XOM Application BU Business Rules BU BU = business user IT = IT application developer

5. Expected benefits for the user • Starts from the business knowledge, not from the IT application • Closer to Business user’s concepts and vocabulary • Supporting acquisition from business people and policy documents • Usability • Better modularisation and separation of concerns/levels • Accessibility • Maintenance, evolution • Quality (incl. consistency, validation, tracking…) • Re-use • Standardisation • SBVR + RIF + OWL (+ PRR + JSR094 +…)

6. Technical developments required WP1 • (Interactive) acquisition of ontologies and rules from business people and (semi-) structured policy documents • SBVR for guidance and, maybe, intermediate representation layer • B(R+O)MS • Tracking/managing dependencies (including with textual sources) • Evolution and maintenance (impact of changes across dependencies) • Consistency checking (across dependencies) • All XXX are discounted 10% during the Holiday period • YYYs are never discountable • Distribution related issues (usability, accessibility, …) • Operationalisation of rules • Mapping business-level terminology onto application’s data model • Coupling with ontology reasoner for what is not in the data model • Execution • Logical issues (OWA VS CWA…) • Reasoners integration • Distribution related issues (availability, scalability, …) WP2 WP1 WP3

7. Key objectives and innovation Acquisition from textual sources Managing heterogeneous knowledge Combining ontologies and rules Standard-based integration • Integrating modelling and acquisition framework • Usable integrated ownership and management systems • Efficient combined execution and inference engines • Appropriate standards • End-to-end pilot applications

8. Use case 1: CAx integration • Domain • The development process is supported by computer-aided methodologies (CAx) and supporting tools • Computer Aided Design (CAD): used for the virtual design of car parts and verification of the geometry • Computer Aided Engineering (CAE): used for simulating the behavior of a car and its functions • Computer Aided Testing (CAT): used for performing physical tests of cars • Problem statement • CAx methodologies and tools may be alternatives and/or complementary functionalities and/or they can be used at different stages in the development process • Across CAx systems, the representation of the bills of material (BOM) varies in structure, granularity and semantics, which makes it difficult to share, interchange, consolidate and/or compare information across CAx methods and tools • In addition, BOMs are continuously developed • Expected outcome from ONTORULE • Uniform representation of process knowledge and CAx method/tool competences • methods and tools should be developed that • make the BOMs comparable on a higher business level, and • maintain the interdependency-information during their life cycle (validation and verification support) • Benefits • Business oriented orchestration and integration of CAx methods and tools • Evolvable and maintainable • cost efficient • fulfilling all legal requirements

9. Use case 2: Steel Quality Control System • Description • Domain: Galvanisation line • Rules: Quality evaluation of the product → path • Input: signals from process parameters • Intermediate states: compound / extensive defects, qualitative assessment (types, severity, extension of the defects) • Output: decision wrt the appropriate path for the product: send to client, downgrade, repair, cut, scrap, to be examined by experts • Problems of the current system • Maintainability of large rule base (partially) embedded in the application code • Transferability (BOM, Rulebase) • Expected outcome from ONTORULE • Replication of (part of) the current system • Assess applicability, maintainability, etc. • Compare usability w.r.t. state-of-the-art system • Benefits • Improve classification accuracy • Reduce complaints • Reduce expert time • Optimize repairing line use

10. Concrete output Commercial products (ILOG, Ontoprise) Knowledge and best practices (all) Applications (AUDI, ArcelorMittal) RTD workpackages Demonstration workpackages Open source standard-based specification Training and tutorials Public demonstrators Standards Scientific papers , impact and exploitation WP1: Acquisition WP4: CAx integration WP6: Integration and standardization Specif. standards Req. Proto. Validation WP2: Management WP5: Steel industry WP3: Execution

11. Questions & Answers Contact: pmo@ontorule-project.eu www.ontorule-project.eu