The Need for a Role Ontology

The importance of employees as knowledge workers acting in the correct roles is not a new phenomenon, but as work itself becomes less tangible, concerns with understanding, describing, and managing roles becomes an increasingly complex, challenging, and important subject. In the knowledge economy, where the employees are in the centre of the industrial revolution and digitalization, there is now a greater need to enable meaningful and well-described roles that set out well-defined tasks that each actor will perform within the enterprise. Also within the extended enterprise, which is the collaboration with its partners, service suppliers, the wholesalers, retailers etc. and the attendant complexity, the need for well-described roles is rapidly increasing. Therefore, it is of critical importance for our frameworks, methods, approaches and practices to answer the need for roles. Consequently, this paper focuses on the missing concepts exemplifying the need for a role ontology with a role taxonomy, clear defined objects, descriptions, class types, stereotypes and subtypes as well as semantic role relationships. It does so by firstly defining the requirements in terms of the scope, objective as well as which challenges, issues and problems should the role ontology as an application ontology address. Secondly, we describe the integration and relationship between the role ontology with domain, core and foundational ontologies. Followed by the description of the design components of the role ontology, this includes its objects, class types, descriptors, shapes i.e. notations, attributes, and relations. We than conclude by discussing lessons learned by applying and thereby testing the ontology in practice.