Ontology management in enterprises

In today's increasingly competitive business market. many large organisatio ns have begun? to research and develop flexible information assets stored a cross hundreds of their databases and application programs by bringing them into open interoperable environments. However, this effort has been seriou sly hindered by various kinds of heterogeneity. Each system 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 m eaningful 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 relati onships between concepts. When defining the relationships between data sour ces, we rely on or ontologies to make the meaning of the different vocabula ries used explicit. This paper explores the role of ontologies in enterpris es, and proposes a methodology for managing enterprise ontology resources a nd a suite of support tools.