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Refinement of the Upper Ontology


For the part of the upper OWL ontology created to deal with history-aware assignments, the elements in the TBox will be refined for each business process used in the organization. This is done by introducing sub-classes of the classes previously defined, together with specific configuration necessary to make it work properly. 


First of all, a sub-class of BusinessProcess has to be defined for each business process used in the company, e.g. the process for conference trip management. Then, a new sub-class of Activity is introduced for each activity type of each process. Similarly, classes representing the RAL expressions of the activities (e.g. RALSubmitPaper for activities of type SubmitPaper) are added, together with one axiom for each activity to indicate that it has exactly one performer that belongs to the subset of Person defined by the RAL expression. Finally, two axioms are added to indicate the activity types that each business process has (by means of relation hasActivity). All the activity types are configured as disjoint from each other.