KIPO: the knowledge-intensive process ontology

A business process is a sequence of activities that aims at creating products or services, granting value to the customer, and is generally represented by a business process model. Business process models play an important role in bridging the gap between the business domain and the information technology, increasing the weight of business modeling as first step of software development. However, the traditional way of representing a process is not suitable for the so-called Knowledge-Intensive Processes (KIP). This type of process comprises sequences of activities based on intensive acquisition, sharing, storage and (re)use of knowledge, so that the amount of value added to the organization depends on the actor knowledge. Current research in the literature points to the lack of approaches to make this kind of process explicit and strategies for handling information that is necessary for their understanding and support. The goal of this paper is to present KIPO—a knowledge-intensive process ontology, which encompasses a clear and semantically rich definition of KIPs, and to discuss the results of a case study to evaluate KIPO with regard to its applicability and capability of making all relevant knowledge embedded in a KIP explicit.