The Role of Competency Questions in Enterprise Engineering

We present a logical framework for representing activities, states, time, and cost in an enterprise integration architecture. We define ontologies for these concepts in first-order logic and consider the problems of temporal projection and reasoning about the occurrence of actions. We characterize the ontology with the use of competency questions. The ontology must contain a necessary and sufficient set of axioms to represent and solve these questions. These questions not only characterize existing ontologies for enterprise engineering, but also drive the development of new ontologies that are required to solve the competency questions.

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