KIPO Opportunities for Interoperability Decisions in Systems-of-Information Systems in the Domain of Environmental Management

Abstract

Considering the increasing exchange of information among systems, the design and development of Information Systems (IS) must guarantee high levels of interaction, communication, and connectivity. To supply the society and organizations demands, IS have been forming an arrangement called Systems-of-Information Systems (SoIS), in which constituents are IS that cooperate with each other to achieve a main goal. Interoperability in this context is a key issue mainly due to the characteristic of managerial and operational independence of these IS. Strategies are necessary to deal with the understanding of the processes involved among IS, people, and organizations that need to interoperate. Since SoIS presents a strong business nature and it has dynamic characteristics, knowledge-intensive processes can emerge around this structure. This study aims to represent interoperability decisions among IS in the environmental management domain through the Knowledge Intensive Process Ontology (KIPO), a meta-model for Knowledge Intensive Process (KIP) modeling. KIPO was chosen due to it capable of making relevant knowledge embedded in a KIP explicit, also, the specialized literature addresses the need for exploring new modeling’s in the SoIS domain. As a result, we investigate which processes and interoperability decisions in this context can be modeled with the Knowledge Intensive Process Notation (KIPN), a notation for KIPO. We evaluated the perceived usefulness of KIPN with experts on environmental management and SoIS domain. We concluded that KIPO can be a metamodel alternative of processes in a SoIS. As contribution, we present KIP modeling as an efficient and didactic approach to represent processes that involve interoperability decisions in SoIS.