Ontological Foundations of Representational Information Systems

A research program around the idea that information systems rep- resent real-world systems was started almost twenty years ago. The program started by Wand and Weber is still going strong with a significant amount of research inspired by them and is one of the few instances incremental founda- tional research in Information Systems. Much of this research is being under- taken in Australia, and its influence has spread far and wide. Wand and Weber have used ontology, a discipline with roots in two thousand years of philoso- phy, to drive empirical work into how well information systems represent real- ity. In this paper the inspiration and progress of the program of research followed over the past two decades is described. The research program has recently progressed from its roots examining information systems develop- ment to examine enterprise systems and other package solutions. Further, it is beginning now to more fully use the depth of ontological theory available. However, there are challenges in how Bunge's ontology has been used and opportunities for using complementary ontologies and for different conceptual- isations of information systems.