Ontology-based enterprise knowledge integration

Enterprises are getting more knowledge intensive, and the integration of various types of knowledge becomes a challenge. It has been accepted that ontology is an important concept for knowledge integration. In this paper, three issues have been addressed: (i) ontology construction which includes the method and implementation of a Concept Map based ontology construction, and the evaluation of the constructed ontology; (ii) a dynamic workflow, in which an ontology-based workflow system is used to accumulate knowledge during the business process, and (iii) the rules and constraints used for knowledge representation, in which a Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is used to group the rules and constraints into different classes executed by a inference engine. Two cases have been studied using the above methods and tools. Case one is an acquisition prototype for the aircraft industry. The other is for an on-going bar code management project carried out by this research team. Both cases show that the developed methods can be used for knowledge integration. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.