An Ontological Approach to Enterprise Knowledge Modeling in a Shipping Company

Enterprise Knowledge Modeling (Ekm)

When developing multiple knowledge models, developers may end up with facing islands of models in which each model is built independently and does not maintain the same picture of the knowledge resources. Fox and Gruninger (1998) call this the correspondence problem. When the problem occurs, two knowledge entities representing the same concept may be used under different names in different knowledge models. Sometimes two different knowledge concepts may be used under the same name in each knowledge model. As a consequence, communication of knowledge concepts among different levels, processes, and functional areas may be very confusing. Therefore, the concepts and meanings of knowledge entities may be misinterpreted. There is also an issue of preserving integrity among different models whenever they are updated. The cost of maintaining a model can be expensive. There is definitely a need for an enterprise level knowledge modeling. Enterprise knowledge modeling (EKM) is a systematic approach to developing and documenting knowledge in the enterprise scale (Kavakli & Loucopolous, 1999). EKM defines knowledge entities, their structures and relationships, and constraints in the enterprise scale. EKM is very useful in providing an integrated, holistic view of knowledge resources within an enterprise. This integrated view improves the communication and reuse of knowledge between different processes, functions, and people.