An Ontology for Modeling Complex Inter-relational Organizations

  • Authors:

  • Yves Wautelet;Nicolas Neysen;Manuel Kolp

  • Affiliations:

  • Louvain School of Management, Universite catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium 1348;Louvain School of Management, Universite catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium 1348;Louvain School of Management, Universite catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium 1348

  • Venue:
  • OTM '09 Proceedings of the Confederated International Workshops and Posters on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: ADI, CAMS, EI2N, ISDE, IWSSA, MONET, OnToContent, ODIS, ORM, OTM Academy, SWWS, SEMELS, Beyond SAWSDL, and COMBEK 2009
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This paper presents an ontology for organizational modeling through multiple complementary aspects. The primary goal of the ontology is to dispose of an adequate set of related concepts for studying complex organizations involved in a lot of relationships at the same time. In this paper, we define complex organizations as networked organizations involved in a market eco-system that are playing several roles simultaneously. In such a context, traditional approaches focus on the macro analytic level of transactions; this is supplemented here with a micro analytic study of the actors' rationale. At first, the paper overviews enterprise ontologies literature to position our proposal and exposes its contributions and limitations. The ontology is then brought to an advanced level of formalization: a meta-model in the form of a UML class diagram allows to overview the ontology concepts and their relationships which are formally defined. Finally, the paper presents the case study on which the ontology has been validated.