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...

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 ...

We report our experiences of converting a carefully defined informal ontology expressed in natural language into the formal language: Ontolingua. The objectives of this paper are 1) to explore some of the nitty gritty details of formalising ontology definitions and 2) to serve as a basis for clarifying the relationship between this and other approaches to ontology construction (e.g. using competency questions), for the eventual aim of producing a comprehensive methodology. We first discuss concepts in the meta-ontology, including entities, classes, instances, relationships, roles, sets and states of affairs. With respect to roles, we define a special meta-class to classify objects whose existence necessarily depends on their being in a relationship with some other entity (e.g a customer). We describe a mechanism for classifying states of affairs which can be used to restrict what can be in certain relationships (e.g pre-condition). We then note some general issues that arise when produ...