An Environment for Managing Enterprise Domain Ontology

Abstract

With the advent of the Internet and electronic commerce, future business services will be jointly offered by autonomous and collaborating units or software agents within or across company boundaries through negotiation and information exchange over a distributed data network. The key is to have collaborative information systems that help with access to information, support decision making and aid in task execution. Although the information systems may already exist to provide the necessary data, currently they often cannot inter-operate to support across boundary business services. Since these so-called legacy systems represent a considerable investment and maintenance overhead there is a need to adapt them to new business environments. This chapter proposes an ontology management environment, a methodology and a suite of tools to support legacy information system integration.