An obvious use of enterprise ontologies is to guide modellers and application builders so that they use terms which are consistent and commonly accepted. Then new models can be easily communicated to others who accept the ontologies and new models can be used for multiple purposes. New applications can be built which access, handle and present information in shared terms.
What is harder to see, and is one of the biggest challenges in the building of an enterprise modelling toolset, is how ontologies can be used to integrate existing applications and information repositories. As we note in Support for Enterprise Modelling, the loss of detail is inevitable in translating the terms of existing information and services into and out of the terms in the enterprise ontologies.