Ein ontologisches Rahmenwerk für Kooperationsunterstützung bei evolutionärer und partizipativer Systementwicklung

Designing cooperation support characterizing work practices in organizations is a complex task for system developers. It should be considered as a change process requiring the participation of various stakeholders within and outside the organization, where the future system will operate. Cooperation modeling should not only allow the identification and understanding of the actual work practices, but also permit the anticipation of the changes the future system will initiate, so that the system could be kept adaptable to the continuously changing environment. Accordingly, both understanding and design activities have to be simultaneously taken into account, i.e. the alignment of software development with the organizational change is needed and should be explicitly integrated into system development and embedding processes. Application-oriented system development, as a principle focus of participatory and evolutionary software development approaches, takes into consideration learning and communication processes as means for taking into account simultaneously understanding and design activities. In this context, the reasons which lead to the resulting complexity can be specifically summarized: At which level are the methods and procedures in the software engineering able to support the interactions between understanding and design activities during system design, as well as the resulting synergy effects, and to initiate simultaneously the multi-level learning processes across the multitude of necessary organizational, work practices and system views? These are the new requirements for cooperation support. A new cooperation modeling approach, new concepts and methods are needed, in order to perceive simultaneously the so far opposite views for understanding and design activities. An integrative cooperation modeling approach is proposed in this dissertation. The research idea consists in the extension of the software development process beyond the scope of a unique project lifecycle, in order to integrate explicitly also the organizational change processes as well as their continuous interaction through learning cycles. An appropriate interdisciplinary paradigm corresponding to the resulting cooperation views is consolidated together into a conceptual framework. The ontological framework for cooperation support (ORKU) is built on this conceptual background. It allows the semantic enrichment of development documents and may therefore be adapted for supporting the reciprocal learning and design processes. The embedding of ORKU shows how the multidisciplinary view of the cooperation could be carried into the development process. The implemented prototype based on Protégé-2000 highlights the practicability and the feasibility of a technical realization of ORKU.