A Logic-Based Formalization of KPIs for Virtual Enterprises

Open innovation is gaining increasing interest as a model to foster innovation through collaboration and knowledge sharing among organizations, especially in the context of Virtual Enterprises (VE). One of the main issues to overcome in such distributed settings is the integration of heterogeneous data, and the need to evaluate common Key Performance Indicators (KPI) capable to measure overall performances of the VE. In this paper we propose a conceptualization of KPIs into an ontology, to provide a common vocabulary to semantically annotate data belonging to different organizations. KPIs are described in terms of dimensions and a mathematical formula. In order to support reasoning services over KPIs formulas we refer to a logic-based formalization in Prolog, where formulas are translated as facts, and several predicates are included to support both mathematical functionalities for formula manipulation and highe-level functions especially suited for VE setup.