Design and Implementation of Semantic Decision Support System for Supplier Performance Contract Monitoring and Execution: Integrating Description Logics, Semantic Web Rules and Service-Oriented Computing in the Context of the Extended Enterprise

Business contracts are the key governing mechanism for inter-organizational collaboration and they are increasingly taking a central role in e-commerce, e-business and extended enterprise governance related to key process integration, exchange of knowledge and information and as drivers for performance. This research is motivated by the critical problem of stark incompatibility between the contractual clauses (typically buried in legal documents) and the myriad of performance measures used to evaluate and reward (or penalize) supply participants in the extended enterprise. This difference between what is contractually expected and what is actually performed in addition to the lack of transparency of what is measured and how those measures relate to the contractual obligations make it difficult, error prone and confusing for different partner organizations. To address this critical issue, in this paper, we present a supplier performance contract monitoring and execution decision support architecture and its prototype implementation using a real business case study. In this research, we use OWL DL Knowledge Representation formalism and the Protégé 3.2.1 Ontology Development Environment to develop the Extended Enterprise Supplier Performance Contract Ontology. OWL DL has been extended with Horn Rules like formalism to express Semantic Rules that make use of the concepts and roles defined in an OWL DL ontology. We use the SWRL extension of OWL-DL to represent contract conditions and rules as part of the ontology and then use the Jess Rule Reasoner to execute the contract rules integrating with Service Oriented Computing to provide decision support to managers in the extended enterprise.