Ontology and Its Application in Supply Chain Information Management

Since ontology was put forward by Neches and Fikes in 1991, the research on ontology is becoming increasingly matured after more than 10 years development. Although usages on concepts and terms related with ontology do not keep completely identical, the agreement of actual use has emerged. Most researches are concentrated on theoretic in current ontology research, while practical application of ontology is still less. Ontology takes the role as a philosophical concept originally, which regarded as an explanation or description to an objective existing system from the philosophy category, and concerns the abstract nature of the objective reality. Later, it is given a new definition by the artificial intelligence category with the development of artificial intelligence. Neches and Fikes (1991) define ontology as the “explicit formal specifications of the terms in the domain and relations among them”. The terms and relations are abstract description of phenomenon happened in the word. Gruber (1993) gives a most popular definition to ontology:”ontology is the clear specification on a conceptual model”. Based on this definition, another new concept of ontology is given by Borst, i.e. (1997) as “ontology is the clear specification on a sharing conceptual model”. Studer (1998) thinks that ontology consists of four layers meaning after an in-depth studying on the two above definitions, which are “conceptualization”, “explicit”, “formal” and “share”. Conceptualization refers to models obtained by abstracting some related phenomenon in the objective world, which performs independent of the specific state of the environment. Explicit refers to explicit definitions to used concepts and their restriction. Formal refers to the ontology model can be processed by computer. Share refers to ontology aims at group consensus instead of individual consensus. The ontology goal is to capture the knowledge of relevant domain, provide a common understanding to the knowledge, confirm vocabularies of the domain and define the relationships between the vocabularies clearly. Some scholars regard ontology as an approach to construct knowledge base. There are different ontology category modes according to different ontology attributes. Gruber (1993) divides ontology into four classes as its level of detail and level of dependence: top level