An Ontological Approach to Select R&D Evaluation Metrics

Performance management is very popular in business area and seems to be an exciting topic. Despite significant research efforts and myriads of performance metrics, performance management today as a rigorous approach is still in an immature state and metrics are often selected based on intuitive and heuristic approach. In a R&D sector, the difficulty to select the proper performance metrics is even more increasing due to the natural characteristics of R&D such as unique or domain-specific problems. In this paper, we present a way of presenting R&D performance framework using ontology language. Based on this, the specific metrics can be derived by reusing or inheriting the context in the framework. The proposed ontological framework is formalized using OWL(Ontology Web Language) and metrics selection rules satisfying the characteristics of R&D are represented in SWRL(Semantic Web Rule Language). Actual metrics selection procedure is carried out using JESS rule engine, a plug-in to Prot��g��, and illustrated with an example, incorporating a prevalent R&D performance model:TVP(Technology Value Pyramid)