Ontology Management in Enterprises

In today's increasingly competitive business market, many large organisations have begun to research and develop flexible enterprises in order to be able to quickly respond to market opportunities. They are seeking ways to maximise the power of information assets stored across hundreds of their databases and application programs by bringing them into open interoperable environments. However, this effort has been seriously hindered by various kinds of heterogeneity. Each system has its own domain model for its environment and efficient task operations. However, in order for systems to communicate and co-operate effectively, a shared domain model is required. The semantics of the common, and each local, model must be captured explicitly and formally to enable meaningful information exchange.The semantics of diverse information resources are captured by ontologies — definitions of terms as used in data sources, i.e. concepts and the relationships between concepts. When defining the relationships between data sources, we rely on ontologies to make the meaning of the different vocabularies used explicit. This paper explores the role of ontologies in enterprises, and proposes a methodology for managing enterprise ontology resources and a suite of support tools.