COOP: A core ontology of organization’s processes for group decision making

Abstract

New performance requirements to adapt to the changing environment and to maintain a competitive advantage have contributed since the 1980s to the emergence of new types of organizations focused on projects or processes. To facilitate the implementation of this process view of organizations, many theorists and practitioners have proposed analysis and modelling frameworks, ontologies being considered as a relevant tool to conduct a ‘semantic analysis’ of business processes. This analysis provides a referential of concepts defined through consensus between domain experts. These concepts should improve the commensurability of the interpretation schemas of the decision makers. Thus, in general, any decision-making process consists of four phases, which are: (1) intelligence, (2) design, (3) choice and (4) evaluation and revision. The ‘design’ phase is aimed at building a repository of concepts collected from the first phase. These concepts model the activity of the organization in terms of knowledge. This knowledge should be shared and adopted by the group decision makers in order to perform any collective decision. Approaches in this area are, however, based on ad hoc, often implicit modelling principles, and the proposed ontologies remain poor in terms of expressiveness. The objective of this paper is to analyse the ontological foundations of the processes of organizations following a formal approach. We propose a core ontology of organization processes which specializes the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) foundational ontology and supplementing Bottazzi and Ferrario’s DOLCE-based formal ontology of organizations. This ontology comprises several modules to reflect both the ‘static’ aspects of organizations and their behaviours, including intentional ones. In this article, we present the contents of the ontology, the formal ontological tools reused for its design, and the various theories the ontology is committed to.