The CEO Project's Scope
The CEO has a wide scope encompassing the full range of enterprises and the activities that they undertake. However, as a Core Ontology, its focus is restricted to the major core categories that underlie and unify most enterprises. As part of the initial planning an intuitive guess was made as to what these might be - and this identified these three major categories:
- Person (AKA Party), who can enter into a
- Transaction, which often includes agreements which involve an
- Asset.
The CEO's prime deliverable
The CEO's prime deliverable will be a Core Reference Ontology - which will provide a semantic framework that can be used as a tool to assist in many types of project, including the development, deployment and inter-operation of systems.
The CEO's Synthesis Stage
The strategy of the CEO is to, as far as possible, build upon the 'state of the art'. So it has initiated an initial Synthesis Stage, which has as its goal the harvesting of insights from current 'state of the art' enterprise ontologies and their synthesis into a single coherent whole. This will then be used as the foundation for the development of the final CEO.
The 'State of the Art' Review
The planning for the synthesis stage started with an informal review of what ontologies were available. This found that the 'state of the art' is immature and, in particular, that:
- there are not many enterprise ontologies (though there are many resources from which these could be mined), and
- those that exist have not yet reached 'industrial strength' as ontologies.
This ruled out a strategy of merging/integrating existing ontologies. The CEO needed to undertake a synthesis - which will involve an informed, intelligent re-construction on the basis of a sound ontology.
The review selected the following four enterprise ontologies for synthesis:
- TOVE's (TOronto Virtual Enterprise) Organisation Ontology,
- AIAI's Enterprise Ontology,
- Cycorp's Cyc® Knowledge Base, and
- W.H. Inmon's Data Model Resource Book.
The plan for the synthesis stage identified sub-projects based upon each of these four ontologies divided into the three core categories. It selected as the initial project the 'Person' core category of TOVE's Organisation Ontology - this was named the STPO (Synthesis of Tove's Person Ontology) project.
A more detailed introduction to the CEO Project is available here.
A description of the STPO sub-project is available here.
The CEO Project's approach to ontological analysis grew out of the REV-ENG Methodology.
