The Stakeholder Matrix: Supporting the Modeling of Responsibility in Situation-Oriented Directories

Situation-oriented directories help to determine the stakeholder responsible for a given situation. Defining all responsibility assignments for a directory can be challenging if situations need to be distinguished by many attributes and some of the attributes have many potential values. In this paper we present the stakeholder matrix, a compact representation of a situation-oriented directory that makes it easier for users to ensure the completeness and consistency of the assignments in the directory. Our evaluation showed that in a real world case the number of responsibility assignments could be compacted from 33700 to 128. We also review related research and show that compact representations similar to the stakeholder matrix will be useful to support validation of definitions in expert finding systems, content-based access systems and content-based routing systems.