Semantic Technologies for the Project Management Life Cycle Improvement

Existing knowledge of finished projects, such as documents, lessons learned or competences of project members, has to be reused to minimize project related shortcomings and to improve the quality of current project management. Our studies, conducted with 11 IT companies, reviewed the status of current project management practices and confirmed such failings. Thus, these shortcomings are represented as scenarios, which build the base for the project management ontology proposed in this paper. By incorporating semantic technologies to increase the quality of project management processes, our ontology includes concepts about projects, tasks, documents, persons and their competences as well as lessons learned. Our approach will be implemented and evaluated by means of a software prototype, where we extend the open source project management system `dotproject´ with the described ontology, semantic annotations and a semantic search function.