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.