A Context-Based Enterprise Ontology

Abstract

The main purpose of an enterprise ontology is to promote the common understanding between people across different enterprises. It serves also as a communication medium between people and applications, and between different applications. This paper outlines a top-level ontology, called the context based enterprise ontology, which aims to promote the understanding of the nature, purposes and meanings of things in enterprises with providing basic concepts for conceiving, structuring and representing things within contexts and/or as contexts. The ontology is based on the contextual approach according to which a context involves seven domains: purpose, actor, action, object, facility, location, and time. The concepts in the ontology are defined in English and presented in meta models in a UML-based ontology engineering language.