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    Their Value in Enterprise Modelling Their Value in Enterprise Modelling

    As well as reuse, some other reasons for using ontologies in enterprise integration are:

    • to assist in communication;
    • to translate semantics among various lexicons (synonyms, etc.) so that connections can be identified;
    • to eliminate redundancies;
    • to resolve unnecessary and/or missing content.
    Working Group 3 [1] notes that the use of ontologies is a relatively new engineered approach to enterprise modelling and software development but they have have proven their value in many other areas, like data integration and library science.

    The value of using ontologies in this new way in enterprise modelling remains to be proven. Some exciting work has been going on within the Knowledge Sharing Effort [11] and on the TOVE [12] and SHADE [13] projects, but there often appears to be a basic assumption that ontologies are cost beneficial. The assumption may be valid, but we know of no practical examples where this has been demonstrated, and we intend to explore this issue within the Enterprise project.

    Some of our earlier views on ontologies are summarised in [4]. We have recently been focussing attention on two aspects of ontologies: how they are built (and maintained) and how they are used.

    Building Enterprise Ontologies
    Using Enterprise Ontologies