Dx-Onto: A Core Ontology for a Semantic-Based Framework for Managing Digital Transformation Projects

Abstract

The rapid growth of digital transformation (Dx) initiatives across sectors has created an urgent need for structured, scalable, and accurate management of project knowledge. Without effective organization, valuable insights from Dx projects remain fragmented, limiting their reuse and hindering informed decision-making. This research addresses the gap by designing, developing, and validating Dx-Onto, a domain-specific core ontology implemented in OWL and purpose-built for representing and managing knowledge about Dx projects. Dx-Onto models entities, relationships, and attributes from diverse project documentation into a unified knowledge graph, enabling semantic search, cross-project analysis, and context-aware retrieval. To assess performance, a two-pronged evaluation strategy was adopted: (1) scalability experiments using synthetic datasets measured query execution times across volumes ranging from 10 to 1000 projects, and (2) a comparative benchmark against the Core Ontology of Organisational Transformation (COOT) was conducted using a heterogeneous real-world corpus of Thai digital transformation documents. The results confirm Dx-Onto’s capacity to scale and demonstrate a higher domain fit (85.2% vs. 77.3%) and superior analytical utility—including transformation-phase and strategic-dimension diagnostics that are structurally impossible under a general-purpose baseline. By positioning Dx-Onto as the core semantic layer for a future Hybrid LLM-Ontology framework, this work lays the groundwork for intelligent, scalable, and reliable knowledge management solutions in the digital transformation domain.