Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the computer science community, and its importance is being recognized in a multiplicity of research fields and application areas, including knowledge engineering, database design and integration, information retrieval and extraction. We shall use the generic term information systems, in its broadest sense, to collectively refer to these application perspectives. We argue in this paper that so-called ontologies present their own methodological and architectural peculiarities: on the methodological side, their main peculiarity is the adoption of a highly interdisciplinary approach, while on the architectural side the most interesting aspect is the centrality of the role they can play in an information system, leading to the perspective of ontology-driven information systems.

This paper is intended to serve as a comprehensive introduction to the emerging eld concerned with the design and use of ontologies. We observe that disparate backgrounds, languages, tools, and techniques are a major barrier to e ective communication among people, organisations, and/or software systems. We showhowthe development and implementation of an explicit account of a shared understanding (i.e. an `ontology') in a given subject area, can improve such communication, which in turn, can give rise to greater reuse and sharing, inter-operability, and more reliable software. After motivating their need, we clarify just what ontologies are and what purposes they serve. We outline a methodology for developing and evaluating ontologies, rst discussing informal techniques, concerning such issues as scoping, handling ambiguity, reaching agreement and producing de nitions. We then consider the bene ts of and describe, a more formal approach. We re-visit the scoping phase, and discuss the role of formal languages and techniques in the speci cation, implementation and evaluation of ontologies. Finally, we review the state of the art and practice in this emerging eld,

For 1 ontologies to be cost-effectively deployed, we require a clear understanding of the various ways that ontologies are being used today. To achieve this end, we present a framework for understanding and classifying ontology applications. We identify four main categories of ontology applications: 1) neutral authoring, 2) ontology as specification, 3) common access to information, and 4) ontology-based search. In each category, we identify specific ontology application scenarios. For each, we indicate their intended purpose, the role of the ontology, the supporting technologies, who the principal actors are and what they do. We illuminate the similarities and differences between scenarios. We draw on work from other communities, such as software developers and standards organizations. We use a relatively broad definition of `ontology', to show that much of the work being done by those communities may be viewed as practical applications of ontologies. The common thread is t...

This is a comprehensive description of the Enterprise Ontology, a collection of terms and definitions relevant to business enterprises. We state its intended purposes, describe how we went about building it, define all the terms and describe our experiences in converting these into formal definitions. We then describe how we used the Enterprise Ontology and give an evaluation which compares the actual uses with original purposes. We conclude by summarising what we have learned. The Enterprise Ontology was developed within the Enterprise Project, a collaborative e#ort to provide a framework for enterprise modelling. The Ontology was built to serve as a basis for this framework which includes methods and a computer tool set for enterprise modelling. We give an overview of the Enterprise Project, elaborate on the intended use of the Ontology, and give a brief overview of the process we went through to build it. The scope of the Enterprise Ontology covers those core concepts req...

Innovative e-commerce ideas are characterized by commercial products yet unknown to the market, enabled by information technology such as the Internet and technologies on top of it. How to develop such products is hardly known. We propose a interdisciplinary approach, e -value , to explore an innovative e-commerce idea with the aim to understand such an idea thoroughly and to evaluate it for potential profitability. Our methodology exploits a requirements engineering's way of working, but employs concepts and terminology from business science, marketing and axiology. It shows how to model business requirements and improve business-IT alignment, in sophisticated multi-actor value constellations that are common in electronic commerce. In addition to the e -value approach methodology, we also present the action research-based development of our methodology, by using one of the longitudinal projects we carried out in the field of online news article provisioning.

Business models are usually represented by a mixture of informal textual, verbal, and ad-hoc graphical representations. However, these representations typically limit a clear understanding of the e-business issues that confront the stakeholders, and often perpetuate the existing gap between business executives and the IT developers who This article presents an e-business modeling approach that combines the rigorous approach of IT systems analysis with an economic value perspective from business sciences. must create the e-business information systems. This article presents a conceptual modeling approach to

The use and importance of ontologies is becoming more widespread, however building ontologies is largely a black art. The aim of this paper is to identify and characterise what we currently know and to move towards the longer term goal of developing a comprehensive unified methodology. We first identify dimensions for characterising ontologies, to be used as a basis for noting which techniques and guidelines for building ontologies apply in different circumstances. We then give an overview of the current state of the art, noting that most work addresses just a small part of the life cycle. The very few more complete methods are limited to case studies involving single ontologies and they are hard to compare. In the main part of this paper, we examine two such methods and give a framework for comparing and unifying them. We emphasise that different approaches are required for difference circumstances, and give some guidelines for when to use which techniques. We conclude by ...

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. This article is a preliminary survey of some methods, techniques and tools aimed at managing corporate knowledge from a corporate memory (CM) designer's perspective. In particular, it analyzes problems and solutions related to the following steps: detection of needs of CM, construction of the CM, its diffusion (specially using the Internet technologies), its use, its evaluation and its evolution. 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Corporate Memory: Definitions The objectives of knowledge management (KM) in an organization are to promote knowledge growth, knowledge communication and knowledge preservation in the organization (Steels, 93). Knowledge management is a very complex problem and can be tackled from several viewpoints: socio-organizational, financial and economical, technical, human, and legal (Barths, 1996). There is an increasing industrial interest in the capitalization of knowledge (i.e. both theoretical knowledge and practical know-how) of groups of people in an organization, such g...

This report describes research partially done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology within the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Support for the laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-85-K-0124. *Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 tDept. of Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel