Ontology Support for Home Care Process Design

For the implementation of home care systems, using sensors and devices to provide assistance to the patient, it is necessary to develop an easy way to configure each home, since differences between them exist and a personalized one-by-one planning is expensive. To support this configuration need we propose a Service Oriented Architecture which uses process models to create service orchestrations to personalize each environment. Process design requires a good understanding of the application domain; business analysts interview the domain experts and translate their understanding to process models. This modelling may be very complex as the vocabulary used by the domain expert is very specific and difficult to understand by process analysts. Therefore, the process model elements (such as activities and role labels) can be named with inappropriate terms. Moreover, the lack of domain understanding by business analysts increases the probability of errors in the process design. In this paper we propose a methodology in which ontologies are used to support the process design, expressing the modelling possibilities and also provides semantic to help the development process. Altogether the approach aims to facilitate the design of each service orchestrations for home care systems, by non specialists.