This is the Ontology for the Enterprise Project .Conceptually, the Enterprise Ontology it is divided into a number of main sections -- these are summarised below.
ACTIVITIES and PROCESSES:
The central term is Activity. This is intended to capture the notion of anything that involves doing, in particular including action. The concept of Activity is closely linked with the idea of the Doer, which may be a Person, Organisational-Unit or Machine. These terms are defined in the Organisation section and are collectively referred to as Potential-Actor s. Have-Capability denotes the ability of a Potential-Actor to be the Doer of an Activity (or Skill if the Doer is a Person). Actors may have other Roles in respect of an Activity such as Activity-Owner.
Also closely related to Activity is Resource, which is something used or consumed in an Activity. An Activity can also have outputs or Effects. An Activity is linked to a Time-Interval, which is defined in the Time section. An Activity may be large and complex and take a long time. This may be represented as composition of many Sub-Activity s.
An Activity can obviously have happened in the past and may be happening in the present. The term can also be used to refer to a hypothetical future Activity. However, there is a need to refer explicitly to specifications or plans for Activities. This is provided by the term Activity-Spec. An Activity-Spec specifies at some level of detail one or more possible Activities. If the Activity-Spec has an Intended-Purpose, it is called a Plan. The concept of repeatability of an Activity or Plan is captured in the term Process-Specification.
Control of doing of Activities is important to enterprises. This is provided by the Relationship Hold-Authority denoting that an Actor has the right to perform the Activities as specified in an Activity-Spec.
ORGANISATION:
Central to the Organisation section are concepts of Legal-Entity and ORGANISATIONAL UNIT (abbreviated as OU). Both of these refer to things which have a `gestalt' whether they are individual or composite. They differ in that a Legal-Entity is recognised as having rights and responsibilities in the world at large and by legal jurisdictions in particular, whereas Organisational-Unit need only have full recognition within an organisation.
Legal-Entity includes Person and Corporation. Larger Legal-Entities may wholly own other smaller Legal-Entities. An Organisational-Unit may be large and complex, even transcending Legal-Entities. Large OUs will normally be seen as being made up from smaller ones. The smallest may correspond to a single Person, in fact a particular Person could be seen as corresponding with more than one small OU.
A Machine is a non-human, non- Legal-Entity that may play certain Roles otherwise played by a Person or Ou (e.g. perform an Activity).
The Ownership of rights and responsibilities may only, from the legal point of view, lie with a Legal-Entity. Within an organisation, rights and responsibilities for Resources may be allocated to OUs. Therefore Ownership is defined to include this, with Legal-Ownership and Non-Legal-Ownership defined to enable the distinction where needed. OUs may be responsible for Activities.
Within an organisation the management structure is represented by Management Links. The term Manage represents assigning Purposes to OUs. An Organisational Structure will be defined as a pattern of Management Links between OUs. This can include multiple Management Links into any one OU with constraints on the different type of Purposes assigned through each link.
STRATEGY:
The central concept of the Strategy section is Purpose. Purpose captures the idea either of something which a PLAN can HELP ACHIEVE or that an ORGANISATION UNIT can be responsible for. In fact it includes any kind of PURPOSE, whether on a level of organisation and time scale which will normally be called strategic, or detailed and short term.
Like an OU, a Purpose can be composed or decomposed. That is, one statement of Purpose may relate to something which can also be seen to Help-Achieve some grander Purpose. By this means, a spectrum of widely used terms like Vision, Mission, Goal, and Objective can be represented without there being shared agreement on precisely how these terms are used.
Strategy is defined as a Plan to Achieve a high-level Purpose. Based on the concept of PLAN from the Activity section, the concepts key to Strategic Planning can be represented with the terms Decision, Assumption, Risk, and various types of Factor.
MARKETING:
The central concept of the Marketing section is Sale. A Sale is an agreement between two Legal-Entities for the exchange of a Product for a Sale-Price. Normally the Product is a good or service and the Sale-Price is monetary, however other possibilities are included. The Legal-Entities play the (usually distinct) Roles of Vendor and Customer. A Sale can have been agreed in the past, and a future Potential-Sale can be envisaged, whether or not the actual Product can be identified, or even exists.
The Market is all Sales and Potential Sales within a scope of interest. The Market may include Sales by Competitors. The Market may be decomposed into Market Segments in many ways in many levels of detail. This can be done by any properties of the Product, Vendor, Customer, Sale-Price or of anything else associated with a Sale. These properties are Segmentation-Variables.
Analysis of a Market may involve understanding of Features of Products, Needs of Customers, and Images of Brands, Products, or Vendors. Promotions are Activities whose Purposes relate to the Image in a Market.
Notes:
- Status:
- This is the first complete version of the Enterprise Ontology code, in the sense that every term is now defined. There are countless ways that it may be improved, and there are no doubt errors as yet undiscovered. In many places, we have noted specific problems that we are aware of and suggest ways that might help fix them for future versions.
- This version is consistent and up to date with respect to version 1.1 of the natural language description of the Enterprise Ontology (postscript 100k) .
- The main difference between this version and V0.2 is the addition of various marketing terms.
- Below we give details of a variety of some major and minor additions, elaborations and alterations from previous versions.
- It has been partially checked by one independent party, but errors no doubt remain, most (we hope) fairly minor.
- Acknowledgements:
- Our experiences using Ontolingua and the Ontology Editor provided by Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Lab (KSL)
- This formal version of the Enterprise Ontology has benefited from many useful comments and suggestions by Martin King, Piet-Hein Speel, Ian Harrison and Austin Tate.
- Martin King, Stuart Moralee and Yannis Zorgios played a major role in producing the natural language version of the Enterprise Ontology on which this formal version is based.
- Further-Information: A natural language version of this ontology, which served as the specification for this formalisation is available from The Enterprise Ontology Web Page .
- Request-For-Feedback: We encourage feedback of any kind. Please forward any comments you may have about this ontology to m.uschold@ed.ac.uk
- Copyright: Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute , The University of Edinburgh 1995 and 1996.
Permission to use this ontology for any non-commercial purpose or purposes is granted as long as credit is given to AIAI, The University of Edinburgh, as the authors of this work, and as long as this notice remains intact on any derivative work.
The ontology was developed in the Enterprise project (IED4/1/8032), which is supported by the UK's DTI under the Intelligent Systems Integration Programme. The project partners are AIAI, IBM, Lloyd's Register, Logica UK Limited and Unilever.
- Changes: From Version 0.2
;;; A number of role classes were not specified as instances of ;;; Role-Class or as subclasses of Qua-Entity or Actor. ;;; This has been fixed. Affected classes are: ;;; Stakeholder, Shareholder, Purpose-Holder, Partner and Owner. ;;; OOPS: this was right in 1st place, they were instances of Actor and ;;; thus also of Qua-Entity; it is redundant to also specify as Qua-Entity
- New meta-class called Set-Class used to help define Market_Segment
- TODO: simplify state of affairs stuff to be in line with text document.
- Coding-Process: This code was created using version 1.0 of a natural language document as a specification. A small number of changes to the original specification identified during the coding process have been incorporated in a new version (1.1) which is available from
The Enterprise Ontology Web Page . There is a new section describing the coding process. Here we include a few additional technical details.- Sometimes make something a frame rather than a normal entity. E.g. ownership, sale, partnership, shareholding etc. but not other things. Usually there is no particular reason for doing it in one way instead of the other; it is primarily a matter of convenience.
- We do not regard any of these choices as sacred, and we may well have erred on the side of too much detail. But at least we resisted the temptation to define Risk as:
(which is a fairly direct translation of the text into Highest Order Logic.
<
=> (Risk ?risk) (exists (?purpose ?actor)
(and (State-of-affairs ?purpose)
(Potential-Actor ?actor)
(Intended-Purpose ?actor ?purpose)
(Believe ?actor
(Possible (Hinder ?risk ?purpose))))) )
- Todo: Split up this ontology into modules, if any can be identified. One obvious candidate would be for things like State-Of-Affairs and Role-Class and could be called Enterprise-Meta
- Todo: Check every occurrence of the words ENTITY, RELATIONSHIP and ATTRIBUTE to make sure is consistent with how these terms are used in the code. Much of existing text was lifted directly form natural language version, and is thus out of date.
- Todo: Consider defining the two relations:
Hold-Over-Time-Range between a State-Of-Affairs and a Time-Range
and using these to get rid of the When-Hold-Spec stuff and model their meaning more directly and meaningfully. This would also enable Pre-Condition and Effect to again be simple binary relations between an Activity and a State-of-Affairs where the State-Of-Affairs would be restricted to use these new relations.- Holds-At-Time-Point between a State-Of-Affairs and a Time-Point
- Todo: Add Opening summary for Meta-Ontology as per other main areas.
- Big-Change: Pre-Condition and Effect changed to be not only the State-Of-Affairs but also to include the specification of when the State-Of-Affairs is required to hold. The specific changes required to do this are:
** Add new class: When-Hold-Spec which is union of Pre-Condition-When-Hold and Effect-When-Hold
** Add new class: PLANNING-CONSTRAINT which has two slots -- of types: When-Hold-Spec and State-Of-Affairs
It's two major sub-classes are Pre-Condition and Effect (which inherit both slots -- but whose slot-value-types are differently restricted i.e. Precondition-When-Hold and Effect-When-Hold)
** Change the slot-value-type restriction of Actual-Pre-Condition[and Effect] and Specified-Pre-Condition[and Effect] from State-Of-Affairs to the new classes: Pre-Condition and Effect (where specified as template-slots in the definition of Activity and Activity-Spec).
Change definition of Specified-[Actual-]Pre-Condition[Effect] to binary relations whose second argument is typed be Pre-Condition and Effect instead of State-Of-Affairs
- Big-Change: Time Ontology Integrated.
** SIMPLE-TIME replaces JAT-GENERIC due to ontology library re-organisation.
** SIMPLE-TIME defines Time-Range, which is identical to what we were calling Time-Interval
** I Removed definitions of Specified-[Actual-]T-Begin and Specified-[Actual-]T-End;
It was replaced by a single slot called Specified-[Actual-]-Activity-Interval which is of type: Time-Range. The existing slots of Time-Range give the start and end times which correspond to what T-Begin and T-End were.
- Big-Change: New across the board distinction for relationships involving Activity-Spec and Activity. Everything for the former is 'Specified' and everything for the latter is 'Actual'. Any Relationship that involved exactly one or explicitly both of Activity and/or Activity-Spec now is split into two separate Relationships, one for each.
Frame-Ontology
Kif-Relations
Kif-Sets
Kif-Lists
Kif-Numbers
Kif-Extensions
Kif-Sets
Kif-Lists ...
Kif-Numbers
Kif-Relations ...
Kif-Meta
Kif-Sets
Kif-Lists ...
Simple-Time
Frame-Ontology ...
Slot-Constraint-Sugar
Frame-Ontology ...
Ranges
Frame-Ontology ...
No ontologies include Enterprise-V1.0.
No ontologies use Enterprise-V1.0.
Eo-Entity
Activity-Or-Spec
Activity
Event
Manage
Delegate
Market-Research
Planning
Strategic-Planning
Promotion
Resource-Allocation
Activity-Spec
Plan
Process-Spec
Strategy
Sub-Plan
Strategic-Action
Decision
Employment-Contract
Eo-Set
Set-Of-Customers
Set-Of-Products
Set-Of-Vendors
Feature
For-Sale
Sale-Offer
Good-Service-Or-Money
Has-Monetary-Value
Asset
Legal-Entity
Corporation
Customer
Reseller
Partnership
Person
Partner
Shareholder
Vendor
Competitor
Market
Market-Segment
Misc-Spec-Detail
Activity-State
When-Hold-Spec
Effect-When-Hold
Pre-Condition-When-Hold
Need
Market-Need
Ownership
Legal-Ownership
Non-Legal-Ownership
Activity-Ownership
Planning-Constraint
Effect
Pre-Condition
Potential-Actor
Actor
Activity-Owner
Actual-Doer
Customer ...
Owner
Partner
Purpose-Holder
Shareholder
Specified-Doer
Stakeholder
Vendor ...
Machine
Organisational-Unit
Person ...
Potential-Sale
Qua-Entity
Actor ...
Assumption
Critical-Assumption
Non-Critical-Assumption
Brand
Competitor
Image
Plan ...
Product
Purpose
Critical-Success-Factor
Goal
Mission
Objective
Strategic-Purpose
Vision
Resource
Sub-Plan ...
Sale
Share
Share-Type
Shareholding
Role-Class
Segmentation-Variable
Set-Class
State-Of-Affairs
Assumption ...
Influence-Factor
Critical-Influence-Factor
Non-Critical-Influence-Factor
Purpose ...
Activity-Status Actual-Activity-Interval Actual-Effect Actual-Output Actual-Pre-Condition Actually-Execute Assumed Brand-Image Brand-Of Can-Use-Resource Chosen-Activity Competitor-Of Corporation-Of Customer-Range Decision-Taker Employee Employer Execution-Of-Activity-Spec Has-Feature Has-Need Have-Capability Have-Skill Help-Achieve Hold-Authority Hold-Purpose Holds-Stake-In In-Scope-Of-Interest Intended-Purpose Known-True Managed-By Manages Number-Held Owned-Entity Owned-Rights Owning-Actor Parent-Legal-Entity Partner-Of Perceived-Risk Plan-Assumption Planning-Assumption Potential-Customer Potential-Price Potential-Product Potential-Vendor Product-Image Product-Range Resource-Substitute Responsibilities-Of-Owner Restricted-List-Of-Relsents Restricted-Relsent Satisfies-Need Share-Type-Of Shareholder-Of Specified-Activity-Interval Specified-Effect Specified-Output Specified-Potential-Customer Specified-Pre-Condition Specified-To-Execute State-Description Sub-Activity Sub-Activity-Spec Sub-Plan-Of Used-Or-Associated-With Vendor-Image Vendor-Range When-Hold Works-For-Ou
Actual-Customer Asking-Price For-Sale-Vendor Product-For-Sale Product-Sold Sale-Price Sale-Vendor
After-T-Begin After-T-End Always Before-T-Begin Before-T-End During-Whole-Interval Future Ordinary Past Present
Activity Activity-Or-Spec Activity-Owner Activity-Ownership Activity-Spec Activity-State Actor Actual-Doer Asset Assumption Brand Competitor Corporation Critical-Assumption Critical-Influence-Factor Critical-Success-Factor Customer Decision Delegate Effect Effect-When-Hold Employment-Contract Eo-Entity Eo-Set Event Feature For-Sale Goal Good-Service-Or-Money Has-Monetary-Value Image Influence-Factor Legal-Entity Legal-Ownership Machine Manage Market Market-Need Market-Research Market-Segment Misc-Spec-Detail Mission Need Non-Critical-Assumption Non-Critical-Influence-Factor Non-Legal-Ownership Objective Organisational-Unit Owner Ownership Partner Partnership Person Plan Planning Planning-Constraint Potential-Actor Potential-Sale Pre-Condition Pre-Condition-When-Hold Process-Spec Product Promotion Purpose Purpose-Holder Qua-Entity Reseller Resource Resource-Allocation Role-Class Sale Sale-Offer Segmentation-Variable Set-Class Set-Of-Customers Set-Of-Products Set-Of-Vendors Share Share-Type Shareholder Shareholding Specified-Doer Stakeholder State-Of-Affairs Strategic-Action Strategic-Planning Strategic-Purpose Strategy Sub-Plan Vendor Vision When-Hold-Spec
All constants that were mentioned were defined.