An ontology-based approach to role-human assignment in human processes for knowledge intensive services Wonchul Seo a , Sungchul Choi a , Kwangsoo Kim a,⇑ , Jae Yeol Lee b a Department of Industrial and Management Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, San 31, Hyoja-dong, Nam-gu, Pohang, Kyungbuk 790-784, Republic of Korea b Department of Industrial Engineering, Chonnam National University, 77 Yongbong-ro, Buk-gu, Gwangju 500-757, Republic of Korea article info Keywords: Role-human assignment Knowledge intensive service Role-based process modeling Human process management Ontological engineering Topic Maps abstract Knowledge intensive service processes should be managed in a human-oriented way since human work- ers who naturally undertake complex operations of an intellectual nature in the processes are the most valuable resources for service-providing companies. For the human-oriented management, a role-based approach has been widely applied. The foremost step in the role-based human process management is to assign relevant roles to appropriate humans. The role assignment task is also highly dependent on the ability of humans to consider information about roles and humans. In order to manage the role assign- ment in a human-oriented way, this paper presents two fundamental principles upon which the assign- ment task is carried out. First, roles should not be assigned until they need to be activated; second, the authority for the role assignment should be distributed to participants in the processes. In order to sup- port the principles, the information should be explicitly and formally described to enable all the partic- ipants to easily understand and utilize it. Consequently, this paper proposes a methodology for managing the role assignment in a human-oriented way by adopting an ontological approach which can precisely describe the information. From the proposed methodology, human workers can be notified which roles are triggered to be activated and wait to be assigned. Moreover, they can be provided appropriate candi- date humans when carrying out the assignment task. The contribution of this paper is to suggest a role assignment methodology that not only lightens the assignment workload by providing the capability of identifying a small set of appropriate candidates but also enables the efficient assignment by streamlin- ing the assignment task. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Knowledge intensive service activities provide an opportunity for companies to increase competitiveness and accelerate innova- tion by bringing valuable external knowledge to them. A knowl- edge intensive service is a specialized business service that aims to create value-added activities and customized solutions to meet client’s needs by relying heavily on knowledge works (Bettencourt, Ostrom, Brown, & Roundtree, 2002; Miles, Kastrinos, Flanagan, Bilderbeek, & den Hertog, 1995; Toivonen, 2006). As the knowledge work is high level professional work which contributes to the satisfaction of clients’ needs, knowledge workers are the most valuable resources for service-providing companies (Liebowitz, 2001). The workers generally undertake complex operations of an intellectual nature to develop and deliver the services (Alvesson, 1995; Miles, 2005; Muller & Doloreux, 2009). Therefore, systematical management of complex service processes is the most important objective that the service-providing companies have. Traditional Business Process Management (BPM) methodologies and solutions have been applied for this purpose as they have al- lowed the service-providing companies to deal with a wide range of the process management. However, most of the concerns that they take care of are mechanistic system-to-system scenarios with pre-defined workflows. The way humans work in complex service processes is not quite the same as the way mechanistic systems do, since the systems simply follow a pre-defined sequence of activi- ties one after the other. Humans inherently do what they like and what they think necessary (Harrison-Broninski, 2008). Conse- quently, it is necessary to develop a way to manage the service pro- cesses in a human-oriented way. A radical new business theory of Human Interaction Manage- ment (HIM) has been suggested to support modeling and manag- ing human processes (Harrison-Broninski, 2005). In order to deal with the human processes, HIM lays a role concept at its heart since the role concept is generally regarded to be compatible with general human work behavior. There are many different role con- cepts applied in different systems (Zhu, 2006; Zhu & Zhou, 2008). Among them, roles highly relevant to human collaborative systems 0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2011.01.024 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 54 279 2195; fax: +82 54 279 5998. E-mail addresses: wcseo@postech.ac.kr (W. Seo), blissray@postech.ac.kr (S. Choi), kskim@postech.ac.kr (K. Kim), jaeyeol@chonnam.ac.kr (J.Y. Lee). Expert Systems with Applications 38 (2011) 8352–8369 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Expert Systems with Applications journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa