Enterprise Ontologies and Knowledge Management

This paper analyses the contribution to knowledge management of an enterprise reference architecture and enterprise ontologies constructed in accordance with it. A particular enterprise ontology has to support the knowledge acquisition, discovery and modeling efforts of the endusers within the context of their enterprise including the software applications (e.g., ERP, MES, Socio-Technical Tool, Ergonomy Tools) deployed in the enterprise. State of the art in knowledge management; the rapid developments and increasing use made of IT in enterprise operations, calls for increasing IT support also during the knowledge intensive life cycle phases of enterprise entities. The role of enterprise ontologies for knowledge creation in organisations is explained by reference to the life-cycle phases of enterprise entities as defined in GERAM. Section 3 explains an ontology based model for knowledge exchange among different software applications that are used during the knowledge creating processes. This model applies the dimension of genericity of the ENV 40003 reference architecture: generic constructs and models are specialized to construct partial models, partial models are further specialized, instantiated and aggregated to serve one particular enterprise domain.