A Workflow Ontology to support Knowledge Management in a Group’s organizational structure

Abstract

In CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work), managing the group's organizational structure allows to control how the group members communicate, collaborate, and coordinate, to achieve a common goal, in order to benefit an organization or a community. Consequently, establishing an appropriate model of this structure's management is very important, as it can be used as a guide for implementing these kinds of systems. This modeling must be flexible enough, so that it can conform itself to changes within the group and to adjust to the different working styles of several groups, as well as to formally support a base of knowledge; helping to eradicate any ambiguity or redundancy. Therefore, this modeling must formally provide a knowledge representation in order to specify the elements and to control the set of orderly steps on an organizational structure. Thus, a workflow ontology to control such a structure is proposed in this paper. Since, the workflow manages and controls the process, via a set of steps ordered and executed by different organization entities, whereas the ontology specifies the domain of knowledge through concepts, relations, axioms, and instances in a formal, explicit, way. A case of study, to demonstrate the knowledge management of the group's organizational structure, through workflow ontology is shown.

Task allocation and coordination process in distributed agile software development: an ontology based approach

“…Anzures-Garcia et al [ 55 ] proposed a workflow ontology for a group’s organizational structure. The aim was to help computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) teams to overcome the problems of communication, collaboration and coordination.…”

“…The research work by Rajpathak et al [ 23 ] was considered least relevant as it was developed for scheduling applications. Anzures-Garcia et al [ 55 ] do not consider overcoming task allocation issues and the work proposed does not cater for distributed agile software development. The proposed workflow ontology only shows the steps for the development of a CSCW system.…”

“…The authors focused more on illustrating the methodology adopted to come up with the ontology than the criteria taken into consideration. The ontologies [ 19 ] and [ 55 ] have been used for informational purpose and not transactional.…”

RESyS: Towards a Rule-Based Recommender System based on Semantic Reasoning

“…Portrays the Semantic Web as the future web where computer software agents can carry out sophisticated tasks for users [7] and [8]. Semantic Technologies, based on ontologies [9,10,11], provide a common framework that enables data integration, sharing and reuse from multiple sources [12]. Lópes-Cuadrado J. L. et al, present a framework based on ontologies that allows experts to represent and share their knowledge with other experts by means of shared and controlled vocabularies [4].…”