Abstract
Enterprise design knowledge is currently descriptive, ad hoc, or pre-scientific. One reason for this state of affairs in enterprise design is that existing approaches lack an adequate specification of the terminology of the enterprise models, which leads to inconsistent interpretation and uses of knowledge. We use the formal enterprise models being developed as part of the Toronto Virtual Enterprise (TOVE) project to provide a precise specification of enterprise structure, and use this structure to characterize process integration within the enterprise. We then use the constraints within the enterprise model to define a special class of enterprises, and discuss the concepts necessary to characterize process integration within this class. The results of this paper arose out of the successful application of these ontologies to the analysis of the IBM Opportunity Management Process in a joint project with IBM Canada.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Atefi, K. (1997), Formal Models of Business Process Engineering for Design and Design Validation, M.A.Sc., Enterprise Integration Laboratory TR-EIL-97-1, Department of Industrial Engineering.
Baid, N. (1995), Toward an Ontology of Change for Concurrent Engineering, M.A.Sc. Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto.
Fadel, F., M.S. Fox and M. Gruninger (1994), “A Generic Enterprise Resource Ontology,” Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Enabling Technologies-Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises, West Virginia University.
Fox, M.S. and M. Gruninger (1994), “Ontologies for Enterprise Integration,” Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, Toronto, Ontario.
Fox, M.S. and M. Gruninger (1998), Enterprise Modelling, AI Magazine, AAAI Press, Fall 1998, pp. 109-121.
Fox, M.S., M. Barbeceanu and M. Gruninger (1995), “An Organization Ontology for Enterprise Modelling: Preliminary Concepts for Linking Structure and Behaviour,” Computers in Industry, 29, 123–134.
Genesereth, M. and R. Fikes (1992), Knowledge Interchange Format Reference Manual, Report Logic-92-1, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University.
Lin, J., M.S. Fox and T. Bilgic (1996), “A Requirement Ontology for Engineering Design,” Proceedings of 3 rd International Conference on Concurrent Engineering, pp. 343-351. A revised version appears in Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications, 4(4), 279-291.
Reiter, R. (1991), “The Frame Problem in the Situation Calculus: A Simple Solution (Sometimes) and a Completeness Result for Goal Regression,” Artificial Intelligence and Mathematical Theory of Computation: Papers in Honor of John McCarthy. San Diego: Academic Press.
Uschold, M., M. King, S. Moralee and Y. Zorgios (1997), “The Enterprise Ontology,” Knowledge Engineering Review, 13, 47–76.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Grüninger, M., Atefi, K. & Fox, M.S. Ontologies to Support Process Integration in Enterprise Engineering. Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory 6, 381–394 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009610430261
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009610430261