A BPMO Based Semantic Model of Medication System: A Case Study of
Homeopathy
Rajan Prasad
Department of Computer Science, Babu Banarasi Das University Lucknow,India
E-Mail: rajan18781@gmail.com
Abstract: This paper highlights the use of Business Process Modeling Ontology
(BPMO) in Homeopathy remedies; it relates the Homeopathic Remedies and
diseases. Our approach is to integrate BPM by using Semantic Web and Semantic
Web Services. Existing processes can be augmented with semantic annotations,
so that formal reasoning techniques can be applied for execution of business
processes such as mediation, composition and discovery the paper introduces a
concept of modeling of Homeopathic Remedies that supporting “SUPER”
approach to Semantic BPM.
Keywords: Semantic Web; Homeopathy; RDF; Arthritis; Medication
System;BPMO;
1. Introduction
Homeopathy is the fastest growing medical science in the world today, faster than
Pharmaceutical industry as per the results of most of the surveys done regularly around the
world. There is a huge gap between homoeopathy and healthcare industry. This gap will
continue to persist due to the lack of hospitals and institutions collaboration The distribution
of homoeopathy allopathic medicine, through retail outer can be counted on first tips as
compared to allopathic medicine But in west, this is not the case There may be very few
practitioner of homoeopathy but the medicine are very well distributed and has a big market
in first world countries[23].
In order to bridge the gap between homeopathy and healthcare sector a formal system level
framework is required which can supported by a new era in linking domain which is semantic
web.[19]
Most of Homeopathic Organizations have already invested heavily in business process
management. but the Homeopathic Users as well as Experts are facing the problems of
choosing remedy.
In order to fill the gap between the patient and Homeopathic experts and subsequently expert
and Homeopathic Remedies Provider Companies we propose a Model that is uses BPMO.
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Using semantic technologies like ontologies, reasoners and mediators, SUPER defines a set
of ontologies for business process modeling[1]
The core of the “SUPER” ontology stack is comprised of following ontologies:
 Upper Process Ontology (UPO), defining top-level concepts such as task, goal and
condition
a Business Process Modeling Ontology (BPMO), extending the UPO into a full process
ontology, providing abstractions over different business process modelling notations such as
BPMN [2] and EPC [3] sBPMN[4]
 sEPC and sBPEL [5] – ontologised versions of subsets of the BPMN, EPC and WSBPEL respectively. sBPEL is additionally enriched with extensions from the
 Web Services Modelling Ontology (WSMO)[6]. for goal-oriented discovery,
mediation and execution of services. The SUPER ontology stack provides the means
for existing BPMN or EPC models to be ontologically “lifted”, i.e. semantically
annotated with reference to domain ontologies and reference to WSMO goals and
semantic constraints (in terms of formal pre-conditions, post-conditions, assumptions
and effects).[6]
2.0 Related Work
Semantic Business Process Management[8],[9].has the main objective of improving the level
of automation in the specification, implementation, execution, and monitoring of business
processes by extending business process management tools with the most significant results
from the area of semantic web. When the focus is on process modeling i.e. the activity of
specification of business processes at an abstract level (descriptive and non executable),
annotating process descriptions with labels taken from a set of domain ontologies provides
additional support to the business analysis[11]. A crucial step in process modeling is the
creation of valid diagrams which not only comply with the basic requirements of the process
semantics, but also satisfy properties that take into account the domain specific semantics of
the labels of the different process elements. For instance, an important requirement for a valid
on-line shopping process should be the fact that the activity of providing personal data is
always preceded by an activity of reading the policy of the organization. As the notion of
semantically annotated processes becomes more and more popular, and business experts start
to annotate elements of their processes with semantic objects taken from a domain ontology,
there is an increasing potential to use Semantic Web technology to support business experts
in their modeling activities, including the modeling of valid diagrams which satisfy
semantically enriched and domain specific constraints. A clear demonstration of this, is the
stream of recent work on the introduction and usage of formal semantics to support Business
Process Management.[13,14,6,1,12,10]
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By analyzing this stream of work we can roughly divide the different approaches into two
groups:
 Those adding semantics to specify the dynamic behavior exhibited by a business
process,
 Those adding semantics to specify the meaning of the entities of a business process in
order to improve the automation of business process management.
Our approach is focused second group using of Semantic Web technology to specify and
verify structural constrains, i.e. (constraints that descend from structural requirements which
refer to descriptive properties of the annotated process diagram and not to its execution).
We focus on structural requirements for the following fundamental reasons:

Structural requirements complement behavioral properties, as they can be used to
express properties of the process which cannot be detected by observing the execution
of a process
 Structural requirements provide an important class of expressions whose satisfiability
can be directly verified with existing WSML reasoners.
We propose a concrete formalization of typical classes of structural requirements over
annotated BPMO processes, showing how WSML reasoners can be used to provide the
verification services to support modeling activities, to elaborate further we have shown first
recall how to represent semantically annotated BPMO processes within an WSML, and later
on shown how to automatically translate an annotated BPMO process into a set of assertions
of the Business Process Knowledge Base and evaluate the usage of Description Logic
reasoners to validate its structure.
2.1 WSMO Studio: A Brief Overview.
WSMO Studio4[1] is an open source, Eclipse based Semantic Web Services modelling
environment. With its support for modelling of WSMO elements used in BPMO, such as
ontologies, goals and WSML logical expressions (for preconditions, post-conditions,
assumptions and effects). WSMO Studio provides a good starting point for the BPMO based
semantic business process modeling environment in “SUPER”. Furthermore, its open source
licence (LGPL) and Eclipse based architecture that makes it easy for 3rd parties to integrate,
customize and extend its functionality.[1]
3.0 Basic Concepts of BPMO
The basic concepts of semantic annotation of existing BPMN/EPC process models, i.e.
adding references to ontology elements, WSMO goals and semantic constraints. In order to
introduce the idea of semantic BPM, it is important to preserve company’s investments by reusing existing enterprise models
3.1 Ontology:
In the context of information technology, an ontology is a “formal explicit specification of a
shared conceptualization”[15] more specifically, an ontology defines concepts and relations
between those concepts. it can be used to make sure different entities, for example
“dilutions”, “Syrup”, “complex” is a part of liquids, which are further grouped into
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products[19] Ontologies in WSMO consist of concepts, relations, functions and instances.
Concepts are basic elements of the terminology (i.e. symptoms’), instances are concrete
instances of these concepts (i.e. swelling and stiffness of joints), relations model
interdependencies between the specified concepts (i.e. Arthritis hasSymptoms swelling and
stiffness of ) and functions are special relations, which can describe more complex relations
between concepts. The creation and maintenance of an ontology for a broad problem domain
can be challenging, therefore, WSMO is designed to make modular design by importing the
ontology allowing the construction of one large ontology for a specific target from smaller,
more domain specific ontologies. Importing ontologies right away requires that there are no
conflicts between the imported ontologies[16].
3.2 Goal:
The counterpart of a Web Service in WSMO is a Goal. A goal defines an objective which a
user seeks to accomplish, and it is described in the same terms as a web service, namely the
capability and the interface which the user desires. Thus, essentially, a user goal is
represented as the description of a web service which would potentially fulfill his desire.[16]
3.3 Web Services:
Web Service is defined by specifying what the web service can do. This definition is given in
terms of the capabilities of the web service. A capability is in turn defined by preconditions
and postconditions, specifying the information space of the web service before and after
execution of the web service, and by assumptions and effects, describing the state of the
world before and after execution apart from the capabilities of the web service, a web service
definition also includes the web service’s interface. The interface describes how the
capabilities of a web service can be fulfilled by describing the service’s choreography[16]
3.4 Mediators
Mediators in WSMO handle variety of interoperability problems between WSMO elements.
They are expected to link reusable vocabularies and interaction styles, facilitating the
integration of services offered by different service providers [17].WSMO defines four types
of mediators, which offer an increasing amount of mediation support: OO Mediators offer
data level mediation; GG Mediators use OO Mediators for data level mediation, and offer
mediation. WG Mediators extends this by offering mediation on the communication level,
and WW Mediators solve heterogeneity problems between web services in case of web
service composition.
3.5 Semantic Execution Environments:
To illustrate the roles the WSMX components play in the usage of WSMX, the basic WSMX
execution flow is depicted in Figure 1. WSMX defines three modes of operation:[16].
1. Registration: In registration mode service providers and requesters register their services,
goals, ontologies and mediators with WSMX. When registering some instance, a WSML
document is provided for running WSMX instance via the Communication Manager. The
5
document is then processed by the Parser, and if the document is valid, its internal
representation is stored in WSMX’s persistent storage using the Resource Manager.
2. Discovery: After WSML documents have been registered, WSMX can be used to perform
discovery. Service requesters send a discovery request to some WSMX adapter, which in turn
translates the message to WSML format. This WSML document is passed on to the Receiver
component, then validated using the Parser, and finally put into the Discovery framework,
which performs the actual discovery activity.
3. Invocation: In this mode, WSMX invokes one or more web services on behalf of a service
requester. In this position, WSMX may for example provide mediation services. In case of an
invocation, a WSML document from the requester is parsed, and then sent back into the
communication manager, which will in turn invoke a service at a service provider using the
appropriate adapter. The process involves the Communication Manager which may employ
Data Mediators to mediate between requester and provider on the data level, and use
Choreography Engine to behave according to the service provider’s choreography.
Fig.1 WSMX execution flow[16]
4.0 Ontology and Semantic Web
The OWL, Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process
the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL facilitates
greater machine interpretability than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema by
providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics.[19]
4.1 Semantic Web Framework:
Semantic technologies provides common framework and define the communication between
systems in addition to the standards that govern the data and structure of semantic web. The
Representational State Transfer (REST) software architecture is a style of software
architecture already defined for the distributed systems such as World Wide Web. Within this
structure, the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a packaging protocol used for calling
specific functions remotely and for the applications that send messages back and forth to
execute some functionality described by a Web service while the Universal Discovery
6
Description Integration (UDDI) standard provides access to the web services and provide
access to Web Services Description Language (WSDL) describing the message formats and
protocol bindings required to interact with the web services. Fundamentally, these standards
and architecture exist to facilitate the smooth and efficient exchange of data across different
computers and networks[21] as shown in Figure.2.
A third major element, Intelligent Physical Agents (IPAs), is software that is distributed in
parallel and exhibits some aspects of artificial intelligence such as reasoning and learning. In
semantic web, IPAs create connections between the contents, mapping relationships,
providing user recommendation, efficient searching of contents and anything that is capable
of goal directed behavior.
Figure.2 Architecture of semantic web services[21]
5.0 Proposed Work: In this section we propose the five kinds ontologies. We have used the
Supper tool that support the modeling Environment of the semantic web services as well as
execution of the semantic web services
 Homoeopathy Products Ontology
 Symptoms Ontology
 Diseases Ontology
 Homeopathic Experts Ontology
 Homeopathic Organization Ontology
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Figure 3.BPMO Diagram of Homeopathic Medicine
5.1 Working of the BPMO Model:
We Propose the BPMO Based Semantic Model of the Homeopathic Remedy
The Following model is divided into four segments
5.1.1Discovery of Diseases:
In the First segment we propose an ontology of the disease by taking the input of the patient
in the form of symptoms. The Responsibility of findDiseasesGoal is to discover the Patient
Diseases according to the symptoms. The following figure 3 above highlights the ontology of
Symptoms. The code below describes.
wsmlVariant _"http://www.wsmo.org/wsml/wsml-syntax/wsml-flight"
namespace { _"http://www.homeopathy.org/"
,
wsmostudio _"http://www.wsmostudio.org#" }
goal findDiseases
nonFunctionalProperties
wsmostudio#version hasValue "0.7.3"
endNonFunctionalProperties
capability findDiseasesACapability
The figure 4 shown below the relationship between classes and objects where classes are
having direct relationship with the objects using rdf:object. For example Symptoms has
various objects like inflammation of all joints, Muscular pains, soothing effect on inflamed
membrane and swelling and stiffness of joints connected by rdf:object
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Fig.4 Medication System Ontology[19]
5.1.2 Discovery of Homeopathic Experts:
In the Second segment the output of the first segment will act as input of the second segment.
This segment has the responsibility of find the Homeopathic experts from the Homeopathic
experts ontology based on their domain experts of diseases. The findhomeopathicExpertGoal
is responsible for that discovery
5.1.3 Discovery of Homeopathic Remedy:
In the third segment the output of the second step act as the input in the third step we propose
the ontology of Homeopathic Remedies. The Goal of findHomeopathicRemediesGoal is
responsible for find the suitable Remedies on the basis of previous step.
5.1.4 Discovery of Homeopathic manufacturing Organization:
In the last segment output of the third step act as input. We propose an Ontology of the
Homeopathic Organization and findHomeopathicOrganizationGoal is Responsible to
discover the Organization which most suitable for the patient as well as Homoeopathic.
The figure 5 is shown the WSML view of the Homeopathy ontology in the figure we
described the relationship between the super class and sub classes, apart from that the
instances
and
functionality
of
the
ontology
when
executes
the
findHomeopathicRemediesGoal then the results was visualized as shown in figure 6. The
output of the above goal is based on the goal discovery and its shown the Homeopathic
products as well as the particular Homeopathic organization and the expert of the
homeopathic based on the domain.
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Figure 5. WSML diagrm of Homeopathy ontology
Figure 6.Result of the goal findHomeopathicRemediesGoal
6.0 Conclusion and Future Scope:
In this paper we have presented an ontology-based framework of Homeopathic Remedies that
verifies a set of structural constraints involving both the knowledge about the homeopathic
remedies, domain experts and the process of homeopathic organization. We have also
10
described a tool for the automated transformation of an annotated business process into OWL
ontology and evaluated how standard WSML reasoners can be used to automatically verify
these constraints as ontology consistency, that is available to the business designer, predefined high level merging axioms can be directly plugged in the system, and (candidate)
annotations can be provided automatically by means of matching algorithms. In future work
extends the mapping of homeopathic remedies to symptoms on the basis of the objects. It is
“Domain Independent” merging axioms are to be generated by examining different upperlevel ontologies; which includes exploring Potency of drugs based on the intensity of the
diseases.
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