Social Business Object Ontology (SoBOOnt): A formal description of a novel concept for social features

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the novel concept of “social features for process-oriented business objects” that extends existing research on the Social Network of Business Objects (SoNBO). In SoNBO, data is extracted from heterogenous source systems in the form of business objects and a user-specific knowledge graph is generated and used as a navigation structure in a web application (the so-called SoNBO Explorer). Up to now, the SoNBO Explorer has been limited to information retrieval and access, which is now enriched with interactive functionality, the so called “social features”, that allow the user to add content and thus interact with the information objects. The solution builds on the idea of “social profiles” that are used to represent people in Enterprise Social Networks and extends this idea to business objects. People and objects become (equal) nodes in a knowledge graph on which the user can perform (social) functionality (e.g. following, liking, commenting, tagging, etc.). This way the idiosyncratic functionalities of human-centred collaboration software is applied to process-aware ERP systems. We present the formalisation of our concept in the Social Business Object Ontology (SoBOOnt).