Semantic Models of Performance Indicators: A Systematic Survey

Performance Indicators and metrics are essential management tools. They provide synthetic objective measures to monitor the progress of a process, set objectives and assess deviations, enabling effective decision making. They can also be used for communication purposes, facilitating the sharing of objectives and results, or improving the awareness on certain phenomena, thus motivating more responsible and sustainable behaviors. Given their strategic role, it is of paramount importance, as well as challenging, to guarantee that the intended meaning of an indicator is fully shared among stakeholders, and that its implementation is aligned with the definition provided by decision makers, as this is a precondition for data quality and trustworthiness of the information system. Formal models, such as ontologies, have been long investigated in the literature to address the issues. This paper proposes a comprehensive survey on semantic approaches aimed to specify conceptual definitions of indicators and metrics, illustrating also the advantages of these formal approaches in relevant use cases and application domains.