Setting up an Ontology of Business Models

The overall goal of the ongoing research described in this paper is to combine business management research in the domain of business models with more technical and conceptual research in the domain of informatics, particularly ontologies. In other words we aim at applying the rigor, precision, more complete descriptions (e.g. constraints and rules) and reasoning of ontologies to the concept of business models. The formalization of a business model ontology will provide the conceptual foundation for new methods and computer-based tools for such diverse fields as managementlevel business model design, business strategy & Information Technology/Information Systems alignment, more technical process & requirements engineering, and automatic comparison of business models . This more formal approach will remove eventually existing ambiguities and will allow the use of the reasoning capabilities of an ontology based upon a logic language to check the consistency and satisfiability of the business model, and complement the business model with integrity constraints and deduction rules. A business model reference model (i.e. business model ontology) as proposed in [7] and outlined in the next section is a first step on the way to clarifying what terms and concepts belong into a business model and how they relate to each other. However, the proposed model is not yet sufficiently rigid and formal for building the foundation for more sophisticated requirement elicitation methods and computerbased tools. Section 3 shortly sketches the research in progress in order to formally model the ontology we have designed. Section 4 shortly compares two extreme kinds of models, description logics and conceptual models, that could be selected, and gives the rationale for adopting an OWL paradigm for defining our ontology. The last section presents our claim that modeling the business model of companies, and not only the enterprise model, should contribute to improving interoperability.