Work Item

Perception new in 2.0 since 2.0 aow:WorkItem

The unit of business work that the rest of the ontology is about: a claim, an application, an order, a case, a ticket.

Identifies the item that Intents, Tasks, Actions, and Observations refer to, so work on one item can be followed across systems, agents, and people.

Attributes

Attribute	Type	Required	Description
`item_type`	string	yes	The kind of work item, for example "insurance-claim" or "purchase-order".
`external_ref`	string		Identifier of the item in its system of record.
`state`	string		Current business state of the item, in the vocabulary of its system of record.
`opened_at`	datetime		When the item entered the process.
`closed_at`	datetime		When the item left the process, if it has.

Every entity also has an id and a type, and may carry label, description, and the provenance facet: version, created_at, created_by, revision_of.

Pointed to by

From	Relationship	Read backward as
Intent, Task, Action	`concerns`	is subject of
Observation	`about`	observed by
Result	`affects`	affected by

Notes

In version 1.0 the work item was implicit in Context (for example, "ctx-claim-84933"). As a separate entity, it can be referenced by several Intents and Tasks.

Corresponds to a case or object in process mining (IEEE 1849 XES and the OCEL 2.0 object-centric event log format).

Alignments

Standard or protocol	Term	Correspondence
OCEL 2.0	`object`	closeMatch
IEEE 1849 XES	`trace (case)`	relatedMatch
BPMN 2.0	`Data Object`	relatedMatch

Example

Source: examples/claims-processing.jsonld. The example passes all validation checks.

{
  "id": "claim-84933",
  "type": "WorkItem",
  "item_type": "disability-claim",
  "external_ref": "CLM-2026-084933",
  "state": "approved",
  "opened_at": "2026-09-14T09:12:04Z"
}

Term reference · JSON Schema · SHACL shape aowsh:WorkItemShape