THE ENTERPRISE ONTOLOGY

This is a comprehensive description of the Enterprise Ontology, a coll ection of terms and definitions relevant to business enterprises. We s tate its intended purposes, describe how we went about building it, de fine all the terms and describe our experiences in converting these in to formal definitions. We then describe how we used the Enterprise Ont ology and give an evaluation which compares the actual uses with origi nal purposes. We conclude by summarising what we have learned. The Ent erprise Ontology was developed within the Enterprise Project, a collab orative effort to provide a framework for enterprise modelling. The on tology was built to serve as a basis for this framework which includes methods and a computer tool set for enterprise modelling. We give an overview of the Enterprise Project, elaborate on the intended use of t he ontology, and give a brief overview of the process we went through to build it. The scope of the Enterprise Ontology covers those core co ncepts required for the project, which will appeal to a wider audience . We present natural language definitions for all the terms, starting with the foundational concepts (e.g. entity, relationship, actor). The se are used to define the main body of terms, which are divided into t he following subject areas: activities, organisation, strategy and mar keting. We review some of the things learned during the formalisation process of converting the natural language definitions into Ontolingua . We identify and propose solutions for what may be general problems o ccurring in the development of a wide range of ontologies in other dom ains. We then characterise in general terms the sorts of issues that w ill be faced when converting an informal ontology into a formal one. F inally, we describe our experiences in using the Enterprise Ontology. We compare these with the intended uses, noting our successes and fail ures. We conclude with an overall evaluation and summary of what we ha ve learned.