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An ontology in Project Management Knowledge Domain

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 56– No.5, October 2012

An Ontology in Project Management Knowledge Domain

T.Sheeba, Reshmy Krishnan, PhD. M.Justin Bernard,
Muscat College, Muscat College, W.J. Towell Engineering,
P.O.Box:2910, P.C:112, P.O.Box:2910, P.C:112, P.O.BOX:1040, P.C:112,
Ruwi, Sultanate of Oman Ruwi, Sultanate of Oman Ruwi, Sultanate of Oman

ABSTRACT mechanisms must use a common language that would allow

E-Learning is a process in which electronic medium is used to knowledge sharing to occur effectively. The automated
access the defined set of applications and processes. In e- classification is relevant when people do not hold enough
Learning environment, automatic classification of learning knowledge to identify the theme related to the learning
materials is essential due to lack of common vocabulary of the materials due to lack of common vocabulary of the knowledge
knowledge area in some context. Ontology has the potential to area [2]. Project engineers can be mentioned as an example.
play an important role in representing an area of knowledge. Most knowledge areas as an example, the Project
This paper proposes ontology to automatic classification of Management area have terminology problems. A terminology,
learning materials to the Project Management knowledge area as a general term for all kinds of controlled vocabularies, can
domain. This ontology aims to facilitate the search for help to clear up ambiguities in the terms used in the context of
learning materials within the given domain. The Project project management [3]. It is common that different
Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) was used to development teams use different terms for the same concepts.
define the hierarchical structures of knowledge as it is Thus, it is likely that even professionals find some difficulty
intended to cover broad area of Project Management. The to search adequate learning materials due to lack of a common
Rational Unified Process (RUP) was used to add axioms to terminology.
define the relationships between the main concepts. Two
specific examples were designed to show the automatic In this context, ontologies have the potential to play an
classification of learning materials. Experiments were important role in defining the terms used to describe and
performed using the OWL reasoner Pellet and editor Protégé represent an area of knowledge thus providing a common
4.2 alpha version. The results of our performance evaluation shared understanding of the structure of information among
show that the ontology is able to classify and locate learning individuals or organizations, to enable reuse of domain
materials from the Project Management area, according to the knowledge, make domain assumption explicit, to separate
desired area, role, artifact and activity. domain knowledge from the operational knowledge and to
analyze domain knowledge. It includes machine-interpretable
Keywords definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations
Ontology; PMBOK; RUP; Project Management; Protégé 4.2 among them [4].
alpha
Ontology describes a hierarchy of concepts related by
1. INTRODUCTION subsumption relationships, suitable axioms are added in order
With the development of World Wide Web (WWW), the to express relationships between concepts and to constrain
increased popularity and use of its new web-based their intentional interpretations. Ontologies can be used to
technologies has increased the number of learning describe a common vocabulary of terms and specification of
environments, from simple learning resources repositories to their meaning to the knowledge area [5]. Through ontologies,
more complex learning environments. In such learning hierarchical structures of themes related to the learning
environments, almost all the resources are provided through materials can be defined and also it is possible to add
the computers and networks and students can learn anytime reasoning to this structure in order to help the automatic
and anywhere. It can provide flexible and user-oriented classification of learning materials within the defined
learning environments to students [1]. hierarchy.

This self-learning process can happen through many learning The main objective of this paper is to propose an ontology to
materials, such as slide shows, digital books, audio or video automatic classification of learning materials related to the
recordings, etc. These materials are designed for both on site Project Management knowledge area. Also, this ontology
and at distance learners to use on their own. It allows aims to facilitate the search for learning materials within the
knowledge sharing within a common interest domain and given domain. The Project Management Body of Knowledge
stimulates independent learning. Project Management can be (PMBOK) [6] was used to define the hierarchical structures of
named as one of such subjects. knowledge. The absence of a recognized consensus on Project
Management terminology has been a challenging task in
However, the self-learning environment can be challenging, building the PMBOK Guide, and in achieving an international
even for the brightest and most motivated students in real consensus. The PMBOK is intended to cover broad area of
knowledge acquisition. The difficulty in finding the desired Project Management. The Rational Unified Process (RUP)
learning materials according to the learner’s range of was used to add axioms to define the relationships between
knowledge themes and interest is one of these challenges. the main concepts and enable the reasoning to the PMBOK
knowledge area.
Classification of learning materials according to their
knowledge area scheme improves the accuracy of information The remainder sections of this paper are organized as follows:
retrieval significantly and allows users to browse the Section 2 presents the related work; Section 3 describes the
collection by subject. However, these classification details of the proposed ontology and its integration with the

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 56– No.5, October 2012

ontology for the classification of learning materials according process groups and nine Project Management knowledge
to the PMBOK knowledge areas; Section 4 discuss some case areas (shown in Table 1), which determine the scope of what
studies and Section 5 concludes the paper. is generally understood to be Project Management [7].

2. RELATED WORK However, the guide does not have enough information that
There are several papers proposing ontologies for the Project allows automatic classification of learning materials according
Management area. This section presents these researches and to the hierarchical structure defined for Project Management.
their approaches. Also, PMBOK does not provide a discipline approach to
assign tasks and responsibilities of knowledge areas using
PROMONT [7], is a project management ontology developed relationships among concepts or precise properties within the
from the most notably upcoming DIN 69901 model to model Project Management area. Hence, RUP was also used to
project management specifications. It provides the basis of define the relationships among the main concepts, which are:
common understanding between projects related terms and Discipline, Role, Artifact and Activity. Although RUP is a
methods and thus facilitate the management of projects software engineering process, the concept of discipline can be
accomplished in dynamic virtual environments. related to PMBOK knowledge areas, as shown in Table 1.
A prototype ontological model [8] prescribed by the Table 1. Relationship between the PMBOK knowledge
PRINCE2® project management method is described for the areas and RUP disciplines
project management processes. This prototype creates a
representation of ontology in OWL as a collection of axioms. PMBOK
It was created using the Protégé 4 ontological modeling tool. RUP Discipline
Knowledge Area
This model is used in checking the compliance of suppliers Project Integration Project Management
stated methods with standards and supporting process model Management  Requirements
tailoring. However, it presents difficulties for domain experts  Deployment
as its reasoning rules can be counter-intuitive.  Configuration & Change Management
The concepts of e-Government project management are Project Scope Project Management
presented using ontology in this model [9]. It is applied in the Management Requirements
productivity of e-Government project process which enables Configuration & Change Management
the knowledge reuse, collaboration and interoperability Project Time
Project Management
between all stakeholders related with the implementation of Management
such type of projects. Project Cost
Project Management
Management
PMBOK integrated with RUP is applied to create a model for
Project Quality Project Management
software project management [10]. This integrated model
Management Configuration & Change Management
addresses the possibility of automating a number of tasks for
Project Human
software development.
Resource Project Management
HCRN (hierarchical case retrieval network) [11] is used by Management
the project managers to interlink decision making tasks. It Project
provides a basis for experience management of decision Communications Project Management
making within project management processes by transforming Management
decision situation to knowledge focus. Project Risk
Project Management
Management
As there are several schemes proposed for ontologies in the
Project
Project Management area, there is not an ontology to classify
Procurement Requirements
materials according to the Project Management Engineering
Management
knowledge area. The next section discusses the proposal of an
ontology to help solving this problem.
3.1 Development of Ontology
3. PROPOSED ONTOLOGY There is no one “correct” way or methodology for developing
This section presents an ontology for software Project ontologies. The method for development of ontologies
Management based on PMBOK and its integration with RUP proposed by [4] is followed in this paper. According to the
concepts to classify learning materials in the Project proposed approach, ontology development involves the
Management knowledge area. Some of the widely used following six basic steps. The general stages in the design and
ontology development tools include Ontolingua, Ontosaurus, development of ontology are as follows:
WebOnto, Protégé, OntoEdit etc. In this area of ontology  Step 1 - ENUMERATE IMPORTANT TERMS IN
development, ontology editor Protégé 4.2 alpha is used as an ONTOLOGY
appropriate language and development tools as it is widely To build a glossary for Project Management, we collected the
available. terms from PMBOK and software development area.
The most prevalent Project Management document is the  Step 2 - DEFINE THE CLASSES AND THE CLASS
Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) provided HIERARCHY
by the Project Management Institute with the objective of The main goal of this step is the creation of a set of
serving as reference to Project Management related courses. preliminary concepts and the categorization of those terms
PMBOK’s knowledge area is used as a reference in this paper into concepts. Using the top-down strategy we tried to fit the
to define the Project Management knowledge’s hierarchical terms and concepts into the metaconcept.
structure. This guide identifies a comprehensive set of Project  Steps 3 & 4 - DEFINE THE PROPERTIES OF CLASSES
Management definitions which are “good practice” and – SLOTS, DEFINE THE FACETS OF THE SLOTS
“generally recognized”. They are organized into five generic This step is used to create relationships between the concepts.

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 56– No.5, October 2012

 Step 5: GENERATION OF INSTANCE

3.2 OnrepRUP: Ontology Representation
of RUP
RUP expresses each discipline in terms of its key elements:
roles (who performs activities which have input and output
artifacts), activities (how they perform the tasks), and artifacts
(what the activity achieves). A role defines the behavior and
responsibilities of an individual, or a set of individuals
working together as a team. It provides general description of
the role and the artifacts and activities for which the role is
responsible. An activity is a piece of task a role performs. It
describes the role responsible for the activity and the
artifact(s) needed as input and the artifact(s) produced as
output. An artifact is a document, model, or model element
produced, modified, or used by a process. It describes the role
responsible for artifact. Other elements supplement these three
key elements, such as work guidelines, artifact guidelines,
concepts, templates, reports, checkpoints, whitepapers,
roadmaps and tool mentors [12].
OnrepRUP was developed with Discipline concept and its
relationship to the key concepts Artifact, Role and Activity.
Relationships and their properties created for these four
Fig 1: OnrepRUP general hierarchy
concepts are shown in Table 2.
The Discipline class consists of nine disciplines that represent
Table 2. Classes and properties from OnrepRUP
the RUP model. Discipline class and other classes Activity,
Role and Artifact are represented by the relation
Domain Range Special Property
Property “isDomainOf” as shown in Fig 2.
Class Class (inverse)
Artifact
Disciplin
Task hasDomain isDomainOf
e
Role
Artifact
Disciplin
Task isDomainOf hasDomain
e
Role
hasConsult
isConsultedBy
Role Artifact hasResponsible
isResponsibleFor
isConsultedBy hasConsult
Artifact Role
isResponsibleFor hasResponsible
hasPerform
Role Activity IsPerformerOf

Activity Role IsPerformerOf hasPerform

The general proposed hierarchy is presented in Fig 1. The

PMLearningMaterial class was created to group the PMBOK Fig 2: Discipline class
knowledge areas. RupCoreElements class was created to group
the derivative concept classes: Discipline, Artifact, Role and Similarly, classes Artifact, Role and Activity were related to
Activiy. the Discipline class using “hasDomain” property. Fig 3 shows
an example of “hasDomain” property relating Artifact and
Discipline classes. Subclasses of artifact identify each of nine
disciplines proposed in the RUP model using this relationship.

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 56– No.5, October 2012

3.3 Project Management Learning

Materials Ontology
After the ontology structure for RUP elements are established,
it is then necessary to enable automatic classification of
learning materials within Project Management domain. The
PMLearningMaterial class was created to represent the
Project Management learning materials which represent the
ten PMBOK’s areas. Each PMBOK’s areas are assigned to the
instance of learning material, as shown in Fig 6.

Fig 3: hasDomain property

The Role class consists of six group of roles created within
the RUP, namely: Analysts, Developers, General Roles,
Manager, Production Support and Testers. Furthermore,
instance of each roles are related to the instance of Artifact
using two relationships “hasConsult” and “hasResponsible” as
shown in Fig 4.

Fig 6: Learning Materials according to the PMBOK

In order to recommend the learning material to the three
concepts Artifact, Role and Activity “isRecommendedTo”
property was created. Below table shows the relation of three
concepts Artifact, Role and Activity to the learning material
using “isRecommendedTo” property.

Table 3. isRecommendedTo property

Domain Range Property Special
Class Class Property
(inverse)

LearningM Artifact isRecommen hasRecomm

aterial Activity dedTo endation
Role

Fig 4: Relation between Role’s subclasses and Artifact

The Activity class was created to represent the activity of the
RUP model. The Activity class has direct relationship with the
Role class through the “hasPerform” property as shown in Fig Artifact LearningM hasRecomme isRecomme
5. Activity aterial ndation ndedTo
Role

Through the related recommendation it is possible to classify

the material according to the PMBOK’s knowledge areas.
Thus, it is possible to recommend the learning material for the
use of a specific artifact, such as a Use cases; the execution of
a specific activity, such as Develop iteration plan; or the
execution of a specific role, such as Software Analyst. For
example, a learning material will be classified to atleast one
instance of the Artifact, Role or Activity classes using the
“isRecommendedTo” property as shown in Fig 7.
Fig 5: Relation between Role’s subclasses and Activity

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 56– No.5, October 2012

Table 4. Values assigned to the “isRecommendedTo”

property

Id. Recommend Recommend Recommend

Material ation for ation for ation for

Artifact Role Activity

Learning Programming Requirements

Material Guidelines Reviewer
001
Learning Risk List Update
Material Change
002 Request
Learning Test Designer
Fig 7: isRecommendedTo Property Material
003 System
This type of recommendation helps to obtain a precise Administrator
classification of learning materials when there is no formal Learning Develop
knowledge about to which knowledge area the material
Material Business
belongs to.
004 Case

4. Results Schedule and

The proposed ontology could be used in the e-learning Assign Work
environment to share the knowledge related to the Project
Management area. This ontology will help the project Learning User Interface
engineers in two areas. First, it will help to classify the Material Guidelines
learning materials within the appropriate domain as the user 005
may not have enough knowledge to classify the correct
materials. Second, it will assist to recommend the learning Learning Measurement
materials within the domain. These two cases have been Material Plan
explained with help of proposed ontology in the following 006
sections. The simulations were created using the Protégé 4.2 Learning Report Status
alpha tool. The Pellet reasoner was used to classify the Material
learning materials.
007
Case 1 – Learning Materials Classification
Project Management learning material instances are added in Learning Review
the Protégé, as shown in Fig 8. Also “isRecommendedTo” Material Record
property was used to make recommendations to the instances 008
of three classes Artifact, Role and Activity. Software
Development
Plan
(Training-
Plan)
Learning Project Plan
Material (updated)
009
Learning System
Material Analyst
010

It is possible to verify for the learning materials by knowledge

areas defined in the PMBOK as shown in Fig 9. The learning
materials are classified in three knowledge areas, one of them
by artifact recommendation, and the other two by Role and
Fig 8: Learning materials instances included using Protégé Activity. The proposed ontology can be used to help filter
Below table shows the values assigned to the consistent recommendations among Artifact, Role and Activiy
“isRecommendedTo” property for each one of the learning classes.
materials. For example, it is possible to retrieve all the learning materials
related to the Project Communications Management area.

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 56– No.5, October 2012

Fig 9: Learning Materials classification

Case 2 – Learning Materials Recommendation

Fig 11: Query using SPARQL by Artifact
Case 2 allows the users to find all the learning materials
according to the recommendations done by the three classes
Artifact, Role and Activity.
SPARQL was used to simulate a sample of these cases
possibilities. The SPARQL is an RDF query language, that is,
a query language for databases, able to retrieve and
manipulate data stored in Resource Description Framework
format [13]. Fig 10 shows the result obtained using SPARQL
query which retrieves learning materials recommended by
Roles.

Fig 12: Query using SPARQL by Activity

It is also possible to add new recommendations to the learning
materials according to the use. For example, a learning
material that was added with the Requirement Reviewer role
may also be recommended to the Programming Guidelines
Artifact. Hence, the detail for the recommendation and
retrieval of material becomes more efficient and precise.
5. Conclusion
This paper proposed an ontology to automatically classify
learning materials related to the Project Management
Fig 10: Query using SPARQL by Role knowledge area. Main structure of PMBOK knowledge area
was used to define the ontology. RUP was used to define the
concept and relationships among three classes Artifact,
Queries can be executed to obtain learning materials Activity and Role. The RUP was used to add axioms to
recommended by Artifacts and Activity as well as shown in represent the relationships between concepts and enable the
Fig 11 and 12. reasoning to the PMBOK knowledge area according to
recommendations. It aims to facilitate the search for these
materials.
Some experiments were performed to automatically classify
the learning materials in the Project Management knowledge
areas. Furthermore, the ontology provides views of the
learning materials recommended under three aspects artifacts,
activity and role. This diversity can be another facilitator for
retrieving the desired material.

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 International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 56– No.5, October 2012

The proposed ontology will be integrated to a self-learning Project Management Ontology as a Reference for Virtual
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evaluate the proposal.
[8] Robert T. Hughes,”Project management process
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