Project management process ontologies: a proof of concept

Work is described that establishes the feasibility of representing project management processes as ontologies. The proof of concept is the creation of a prototype ontological model of the project management processes prescribed by the PRINCE2® project management method, the de facto standard sponsored by the United Kingdom government for public sector projects. The prototype was created using the Protégé 4 ontological modelling tool which generates a representation of the ontology as a collection of axioms expressed in OWL, a language developed to facilitate the development of semantic web applications. The prototype confirmed the usefulness of ontologies in modelling project management processes. Further potential applications have been identified such as supporting process model tailoring, and checking the compliance of suppliers stated methods with standards. However, the Protégé 4 ontological modelling environment would appear to present difficulties for domain experts wishing to codify bodies of knowledge as its reasoning rules can be counter-intuitive