Ontologies to Support Process Integration in Enterprise Engineering

Enterprise design knowledge is currently descriptive, ad hoc, or pre-scientific. One reason for this state of affairs in enterprise design is that existing approaches lack an adequate specification of the terminology of the enterprise models, which leads to inconsistent interpretation and uses of knowledge. We use the formal enterprise models being developed as part of the Toronto Virtual Enterprise (TOVE) project to provide a precise specification of enterprise structure, and use this structure to characterize process integration within the enterprise. We then use the constraints within the enterprise model to define a special class of enterprises, and discuss the concepts necessary to characterize process integration within this class. The results of this paper arose out of the successful application of these ontologies to the analysis of the IBM Opportunity Management Process in a joint project with IBM Canada.