Semantic Modeling of Performance Indicators for Collaborative Information Systems

Tutorial presented at the 31st International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering - CAISE 2019 on 6th June 2019. Abstract Performance Indicators (PIs) and metrics are essential management tools. They provide synthetic objective measures to monitor the progress of a process, set objectives and assess deviations, enabling effective decision making. They can also be used for communication purposes, facilitating the sharing of objectives and results, or improving the awareness of certain phenomena, thus motivating more responsible and sustainable behaviors. Given their strategic role, it is of tantamount importance, as well as challenging, to guarantee that the intended meaning of an indicator is fully shared among stakeholders, and that its implementation is aligned with the definition provided by decision-makers, as this is a pre-condition for data quality and trustworthiness of the information system. The tutorial surveys recent semantic approaches to specify conceptual definitions of indicators and metrics, illustrating also the advantages of these formal approaches in relevant use cases and application domains. Special emphasis will be given to distributed collaborative information systems, where semantic specifications promise to offer the best impact when dealing with discrepancies among different definitions of an indicator, data integration, and sharing