Collaborative Actions on Documents Ontology (ColActDOnt)

Abstract

The analysis and interpretation of collaborative work in the Digital Workplace requires an in-depth understanding of the user actions carried out in Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). The academic discipline of Process Mining (PM) provides us with methods and tools for the analysis of event logs. For PM to work successfully, we need event logs that are formatted using a standard (e.g. XES) that can be processed by existing PM tools. This is a challenge for the analysis of collaborative work because collaboration processes frequently span across multiple software products, which record user activity in their own proprietary log format. The data from different systems needs to be transformed and aggregated before it can be used by PM tools. To address this issue, we developed a novel concept for the harmonisation and aggregation of log files from collaboration systems. In this concept, events are described as user actions on documents. We formalised the concept in the Collaborative Actions on Documents Ontology (ColActDOnt). ColActDOnt specifies the concepts and properties of collaboration events. The ontology has been made publicly available in a machine-readable format and provides a basis for the analysis of cross-system collaboration.