Inter-Organizational Process Integration

In a globalized world with ever shortening product and service lifecycles, collaborating with other organizations to achieve a common goal becomes more and more vital. The lack of transparency and company-isolated information systems are only two of the challenges that organizations face when working across organizational boundaries. This master thesis tackles the common understanding of participating organizations by providing a virtual organization and a virtual information system (VIS). The VIS increases the transparency by providing common, organization-independent processes (corresponding to ‘public workflows’ in collaboration). These processes are modeled from the general point of view of the virtual organization and then mapped to the respective processes of the participating organizations. The processes and their data, as well as the system’s behavior, depend on semantic technologies. The knowledge-base is stored in the VIS-Ontology while rules define the system’s behavior. The VIS prototype uses a rule-based approach to orchestrate the process execution. It consists of three main components: (i) a semantic wiki, which provides the basic functionalities (user interface, persistent knowledge storage); (ii) a triple store, responsible for the reasoning; and (iii) the VIS-Coordinator that creates new process instances and synchronizes the ontology (e.g. the states of the processes)....