A Bottom-Up Strategy for Enterprise Ontology Implementation

The benefits of semantics for intelligent and interoperable services have been widely accepted in the computing community. Semantics can also improve the quality of software systems that deal with the every day operations of an enterprise. However, building and utilizing an ontology in the enterprise environment is very difficult and risky since ontology inference is complex, slow, and often unpredictable. Also, ontology management is not scalable and building an ontology is a complicated process that takes a huge amount of resources. Presented is a bottom-up strategy for large scale ontology implementation in commercial settings. Important components of the strategy include harvesting instance level ontology, creating success cases early, and ensuring scalability.