  A critical function of an organization is to foster the level of integration
(coordination and cooperation) necessary to achieve its objectives. The need to
coordinate and motivation to cooperate emerges from the myriad dependencies
between an organization's members and their work. Therefore, to reason about
solutions to coordination and cooperation problems requires a robust
representation that includes the underlying dependencies. We find that such a
representation remains missing from formal organizational models, and we
leverage semantics to bridge this gap. Drawing on well-established
organizational research and our extensive fieldwork with one of North America's
largest municipalities, (1) we introduce an ontology, formalized in first-order
logic, that operationalizes concepts like outcome, reward, and epistemic
dependence, and their links to potential integration risks; and (2) present
real-world applications of this ontology to analyze and support integration in
complex government infrastructure projects. Our ontology is implemented and
validated in both Z3 and OWL. Key features of our model include inferable
dependencies, explainable coordination and cooperation risks, and actionable
insights on how dependency structures within an organization can be altered to
mitigate the risks. Conceptualizing real-world challenges like incentive
misalignment, free-riding, and subgoal optimization in terms of dependency
structures, our semantics-based approach represents a novel method for
modelling and enhancing coordination and cooperation. Integrated within a
decision-support system, our model may serve as an impactful aid for
organizational design and effectiveness. More broadly, our approach underscores
the transformative potential of semantics in deriving tangible, real-world
value from existing organization theory.
