This paper presents some results of an ongoing project aimed at modeling the main concepts related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). More precisely, the paper presents O-CREAM, a CRM ontology based on DOLCE and on two DOLCE-based modules, DnS (exploited for modeling roles and for handling reification) and OIO (exploited for modeling business knowledge by means of information objects). The project relies on the belief that all the actors involved in CRM could benefit from an ontological investigation of this field, aimed at providing a core set of formally described concepts and relations, useful both for describing CRM processes and for specifying the functionality of CRM applications. In particular, a well-formed CRM ontology would support communication and interoperability both in intra-organization and in interorganization CRM processes. The paper discusses in details the axiomatization for the sale and customer relationship concepts, as well as for the corresponding business knowledge items (i.e., sale and customer records). It concludes by sketching a possible concrete exploitation of O-CREAM.

Abstract. This paper deals with a theoretical issue related to multi-agent system development and deployment, namely the need of a mechanism for aligning ontologies owned by agents, in order to allow them to communicate in a profitable way. Our approach exploits upper ontologies, i.e., ontologies which describe very general concepts that are the same across all domains, as a “lingua franca ” among agents. This approach may overcome some problems that arise in various real scenarios, such as the impossibility for (or the lack of will of) an agent to disclose its own entire ontology to another agent, despite the need to communicate with it. In this paper we propose a comparison of seven existing upper ontologies, and an algorithm for aligning any two (or more) ontologies by exploiting an upper ontology as a bridge. 1