Practice-centred work analysis: towards ontology-based decision support in cross-boundary e-health

Abstract

Ontologies are increasingly used as artefacts for representing human knowledge for problem solving and decision making. Studies have shown that the actual knowledge used in problem solving and decision-making often occurs at the work practice level – the level that typically goes beyond functional notions of work processes to include a wide range of contextual, socio-cultural, situated and dynamically changing factors through which individuals, in getting work done, seek to construct meaning out of their experiences and engagement with the environment. However, it still remains an open question how much of the issues encompassed by a notion of work practice is accommodated in current ontology design approaches in system design. In this paper, the creation and use of ontologies is analysed from a practice-theoretic perspective in order to understand the processes of shared conceptualisation and role of ontologies in explicating knowledge about actual clinical work processes and problem situations. We illustrate this using a clinical work practice ontology, which we refer to as WOPRON, and show its capability for representing clinical work practice knowledge for cross-boundary decision support in e-health.