How to Model People Work Practices from Ontological Transactions

Abstract

This paper proposes a model to represent people´s work from ontological business transactions according to the concepts of Activity Theory and Enterprise Ontology. With this model we aim at providing a comprehensive and structured modelling approach that, at the same time, avoids excessively detailed descriptions of technology-supported activities. The proposed model is complemented with a set of rules that enables the interrelating transactions described with the Enterprise Ontology language and task descriptions based on Activity Theory. An important benefit of this model is enabling the analysis of manifested contradictions to identify the aspects needing changes within organizational activity systems. The proposed model and rules were applied in a study case.