Identifying syntactic structures in corpus: An approach for finding knowledge areas in project-driven disciplines

Abstract

Bodies of knowledge and project management standards are defined as sets of proven methods and practices widely applied by practitioners for managing projects in particular disciplines. Since bodies of knowledge are discipline-dependent, when they are applied outside their discipline, they fail in accomplishing their purpose. Aiming to improve such bodies of knowledge, some proposals are made by performing comparisons among them. Particularly, some authors propose the adoption of new elements such as knowledge areas as a result of comparison processes. However, such proposals are empirically obtained and they are dependent on the author’s judgment. Such proposals can be improved by formalizing the adoption of new elements when comparing bodies of knowledge. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a formalization method for adopting knowledge areas when comparing standards by identifying syntactic structures in project management corpus. By formalizing knowledge area adoption, we allow for improving bodies of knowledge in an author-independent way.

Keywords

• syntactic structures
• knowledge areas
• project management
• project-driven disciplines
• project management corpus