Ontologies for Analysis and Improvement of Business Process Quality in a Virtual Enterprise

The paper describes the representation and use of three ontologies in a software aiming at the assistance of a virtual team in business process analysis and improvement (BPI), using total quality management (TQM) technology. In comparison with the existing tools for BPI by TQM, this software has two specific features: (1) the ontology-based integration of the TQM tools (verbal diagrams, statistical charts, data collection sheets, ideas organization tools) and (2) the adaptation of the improvement process to virtual enterprises, where the decisions result from the comparison and integration of ideas issued during the brainstorming in a virtual team. The paper motivates and exemplifies an upperlevel ontology with linguistic features for the representation of objects and processes in the BPI, domain and communication ontologies and of the ideas upon them and, also, for the integration of the TQM conceptual tools.