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Tish Chungoora

The practice of Business Analysis revolves around the formation, transformation and finalisation of requirements to recommend suitable solutions to support enterprise change programmes. Practitioners working in the field of business analysis apply a wide range of modelling tools to capture the various perspectives of the enterprise, for example, business process perspective, data flow perspective, functional perspective, static structure perspective, and more. These tools aid in decision support and are especially useful in the effort towards the transformation of a business into the "intelligent enterprise", in other words, one which is to some extent "self-describing" and able to adapt to organisational change.

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The practice of Business Analysis revolves around the formation, transformation and finalisation of requirements to recommend suitable solutions to support enterprise change programmes. Practitioners working in the field of business analysis apply a wide range of modelling tools to capture the various perspectives of the enterprise, for example, business process perspective, data flow perspective, functional perspective, static structure perspective, and more. These tools aid in decision support and are especially useful in the effort towards the transformation of a business into the "intelligent enterprise", in other words, one which is to some extent "self-describing" and able to adapt to organisational change.

However, a fundamental piece remains missing from the puzzle. Achieving this capability requires us to think beyond the idea of simply using the current mainstream modelling tools. Instead, we need to take into account methods that provide a basis for sharing meaning at both human and computational level, and that are geared to capturing the semantics (i.e. the meaning) of entities that describe our enterprise perspectives. This is where the concept of ontologies come in. Ontologies are representations that provide a basis for sharing meaning at human and computational level, and are an invaluable addition to any business analyst's toolkit.

Ontologies help you formally represent domain knowledge that is accurate and reusable, which aligns very well with your reuse strategy for enterprise knowledge. Ontologies are platform-agnostic knowledge models and building them does not require you to have any extensive technical or software engineering skills. This means that as business analyst, you are able to produce the blueprints for any system or software design project, allowing you to more rapidly prototype information structures and test them out before passing your specifications over to software engineers to implement. Consequently, ontology modelling empowers business analysts as information and knowledge architects.

In addition, ontologies are extremely relevant to the area of information systems interoperability, providing you with the mechanisms to drive semantic data exchange and federation across multiple information sources and repositories. They can also be extended into structured knowledge bases for constantly-evolving linked data that have complex relationships and are held in dynamic schemas, thereby responding very well to changes in organisational knowledge. The thing is - that's just a glimpse of some of the useful benefits of ontologies from a business analysis standpoint - ontologies, in practice, do much more than that.

This course is intended to be a game changer, focusing on providing a comprehensive introduction to ontologies in the context of business analysis application, in order to encourage the adoption of the approach. The material provided in the course covers relevant background information to get comfortable with the concepts being explained, the justifications for applying ontologies in business analysis practice, walkthrough examples, and other important details that are pertinent for you to be able to hit the ground running with using ontologies within your own business analysis pipeline. Become a pioneer of applied ontology in the field of business analysis and lead the way to telling your success story.

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What's inside

Learning objectives

  • Conceptualise ontologies in the context of business analysis, with a focus on their purpose, importance and the underlying business case for their application
  • Understand how to define 'blueprints' for organising enterprise domain knowledge by using the building blocks of ontologies and how they are arranged
  • Appreciate the importance of rigour in business modelling, by capturing formal semantics (meaning) and logical axioms for defining business rules
  • Become familiar with the web ontology language (owl) for building structures that have inherently complex relationships

Syllabus

Understand the course structure, target audience, learning outcomes and more.

Welcome to the very first lecture in this series! We'll go through introductions and take a look at the high level aims and objectives of the course.

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This lecture will give you a feeling of the roadmap for the course. As well as describing the course structure, you'll also gain a pretty good idea of the various learning objectives to be accomplished by the end of the course.

Here, you will find a decision tree diagram that will help you decide whether this course is really what you are after.

This lecture concludes Section 1, summarizing the main points discussed.

Define what an ontology is, understand the structures that make up an ontology, how ontologies are represented and what ontologies entail from a logic-based perspective.

In this lecture, we'll get to cover broadly what an ontology is, focusing on its definition and importance as a basis for sharing meaning.

In this lecture, we'll take a look at the most fundamental components of an ontology. We'll introduce the concepts of classes, relationships, individuals and axioms that we can use to describe a particular subject matter.

The representation of ontologies can be tailored for human and machine interpretation. In this lecture, we'll run through the basics of what's needed for being able to represent ontologies.

Ontologies when encoded for machine interpretation serve as logical models. This lecture covers, at a relatively high level, what the logic based perspective of ontologies is about.

This lecture concludes Section 2, summarizing the main points discussed.

Section 2
Utilise the Protege ontology environment to browse an ontology of the business analysis domain, explore the ontology focusing on the key structural components of the model, and visualise the model.

In this section of the course we'll get to explore how an ontology expressed in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) is pieced together in a descriptive way. The model we'll get to explore is a formal representation that describes the field of business analysis from a basic standpoint. The ontology tool used is the Protégé ontology editor.

In this lecture, we'll download Protégé ontology editor and also run through the necessary steps to get you started with ontology exploration.

This lecture covers the basics of classes and class hierarchies in OWL using Protégé.

This lecture covers the basics of properties and property characteristics in OWL using Protégé.

This lecture covers the basics of class descriptions in OWL using Protégé.

This lecture covers the basics of populating an ontology with facts and fact statements in OWL using Protégé.

This lecture explores ontology visualization in Protégé, as well as other external tools for visualizing OWL ontologies.

This lecture concludes Section 3, summarizing the main points discussed.

Appreciate the importance of ontologies and the business case for them, understand the link between ontologies and interoperability and how ontologies fit within the MDA framework and more.

In this lesson we'll get to kick off the more detailed discussions for applying ontologies in the field of business analysis.

This is a continuation of the previous lecture on the case for ontologies in the field of business analysis.

Ontologies address the requirements for achieving information systems interoperability. This lecture presents an introductory discussion of the benefits of ontologies for semantic interoperability.

Ontologies work hand in hand with important IT and information systems methodologies, including the Model Driven Architecture (MDA), Model Driven Interoperability (MDI) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This lecture explores this understanding in more detail.

This audio lesson provides a core discussion of the cost-benefit implications of applying ontologies within the business analysis pipeline.

In this lecture we will see some concrete real-world examples of applied ontology.

This lecture concludes Section 4, summarizing the main points discussed.

Conceptually grasp the application of ontologies to model business processes and rules, support system design and development, and knowledge reuse strategy.

This lecture covers the essentials of applying ontologies as basis for the definition of business processes and rules.

This lecture explores, at a conceptual level, what the building blocks of ontology driven systems are. We'll discuss the basic architecture for being able to 'plug' ontology models into actual information systems for people to start using. We'll also get to see an example of SPARQL querying in action.

The MDA methodology provides an approach for translating system requirements into platform-independent and platform-specific models. In this lesson, we'll discuss another application of ontologies in the practice of business analysis, which is to support platform-independent system design and development.

In this lecture we'll get to discuss, at a conceptual level, the essence of ontology mapping techniques to enable the reconciliation of multiple disparate ontologies.

When it comes to developing ontologies, reusing already-existing ontology models is a good idea to cut down on the development lead time. In this lecture, we'll get to take a look at examples of good reusable ontologies in the likes of Friend Of A Friend (FOAF), Dublin Core, The Organization Ontology, DBpedia, and more.

This lecture concludes Section 5, summarizing the main points discussed.

Section 5
Acknowledge the soft skills needed to excel in a knowledge architecture role and make use of an action plan to build a first ontology in the context of business analysis.

This lesson provides some further discussions about the topic of ontologies in business analysis. The lecture highlights the key industries in which ontology engineering is currently being applied as well as a preview of some of key skills for excelling as knowledge architect.

This is the last lecture in this series, where we'll wrap up the course.

Download course slides.

Attributions, special thanks and disclaimer.

Bonus lecture

Good to know

Know what's good
, what to watch for
, and possible dealbreakers
Develops ontologies and ontology mapping, which are core skills for business analysts
Taught by Tish Chungoora, recognized for their work in ontologies
Develops knowledge reuse strategy, which is standard in ontology engineering
Teaches the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is the standard language for building ontologies
Emphasizes the importance of rigour in business modelling, which is key for ontologies
This course assumes learners have a background in business analysis, which may be a barrier for some

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Activities

Be better prepared before your course. Deepen your understanding during and after it. Supplement your coursework and achieve mastery of the topics covered in Ontologies for Business Analysis with these activities:
Review of Logic and Formal Reasoning
Logic and formal reasoning are used throughout this course. Having a strong background in these areas can be beneficial for your learning.
Browse courses on Logic
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  • Review notes or textbooks from previous courses on logic or formal reasoning.
  • Practice solving logic puzzles or exercises to test your understanding.
  • Identify common logical fallacies and learn how to recognize and avoid them.
  • Take an online quiz or assessment to check your knowledge and identify areas for improvement.
Review of Business Analysis Concepts
Review and reiterate the importance and the foundational concepts of business analysis. This will put you in a better position to succeed in this course.
Browse courses on Business Analysis
Show steps
  • Go through the course syllabus to identify the key topics in this course.
  • Review past coursework or study materials that you might have on business analysis.
  • Browse through the textbook.
  • Review the definitions and key terms around business analysis in preparation of upcoming lectures.
Build a Business Process Model using a Tutorial
Hands-on practice will solidify your understanding of business processes and BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation).
Show steps
  • Find an online tutorial on building a business process model using BPMN.
  • Follow the steps in the tutorial to create a simple business process model.
  • Review the resulting model to understand the structure and notation used in BPMN.
  • Experiment with different types of activities, gateways, and events in your model.
Three other activities
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Join a Study Group for Ontology Engineering
Collaborative learning can significantly improve your comprehension of the complex topic of ontology engineering.
Browse courses on Knowledge Sharing
Show steps
  • Find or create a study group with other students taking this course or who have an interest in ontology engineering.
  • Meet regularly to discuss the course material, work on projects together, and share knowledge.
  • Engage in peer review of each other's work.
  • Present your findings and insights on the course material.
Practice Identifying Business Requirements
Practicing requirement identification will help you master this core business analysis skill, which is thoroughly discussed in this course.
Browse courses on Business Requirements
Show steps
  • Review the course material on business requirements gathering.
  • Find a sample case study or project description.
  • Identify the key stakeholders in the project.
  • Elicit requirements from the stakeholders using various techniques (e.g., interviews, workshops).
  • Document the identified requirements in a clear and concise manner.
Create an Ontology Model for a Business Domain
By creating an ontology model for a business domain, you will have the opportunity to implement the concepts you gain in this course.
Show steps
  • Choose a specific business domain for which you want to create an ontology model.
  • Identify the key concepts, relationships, and properties in the domain.
  • Use an ontology editor (e.g., Protégé) to create the ontology model.
  • Validate the ontology model by checking for consistency and completeness.
  • Document the ontology model and its key features.

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