A Formal Representation of Standards for Project Management: Case PMBOK

In the last years, plenty of proposals have been created to guarantee the success of projects. However, the rate of failure projects is still high. In that sense, it has been demonstrated that adopting a standard that guide the development of all the stages of a project is a factor that considerably contribute to its success. However, the fact that the information about standards is provided only in text documents (expressed in natural language) hinders its automatic analysis. For example, the task of choosing a standard taking into account the features of the project might become a complex task. Moreover, it is not easy of detect inconsistencies and ambiguities using natural language. On the other hand, ontologies represented in Ontology Web Language (OWL) have demonstrated good results to represent knowledge. OWL ontologies can be analyzed by a reasoner in order to automatically validate and check the consistency of the specifications. Considering the significant advantages of ontologies, the main aim of this paper is to present an ontological model to represent and analyze standards or guides for project management. This ontology can be used to represent the knowledge of several project management standards as well information about their implementation in particular projects. In general, this ontology can support the organizations to make decisions. In general, this ontology might reduce the ambiguity of guides or standards descriptions for project management and enhance its comprehensibility.