I look at a couple of inter-related points:

1. That ontology is the foundation for a revolution (a paradigm shift) in the way we develop business application systems.
2. That (fortuitously) this new ontological way of building systems is well adapted to the (brownfield) legacy systems environment most development projects face today.

I find a good way of explaining these points is using the Kuhnian notion of a paradigm shift – and focusing on the data-process distinction within current mainstream paradigm for systems development. I consider some of the simplifying assumptions that were made when the current paradigm was developed in the late 70s – and the way their uncritical acceptance has warped the perception of the development process. I then describe how an ontological approach helps to develop more accurate and finer-grained picture of what is actually going on.
The new picture (paradigm) reveals that current development approaches are not, as commonly assumed, based upon a pure understanding of the business domain (or what is known about the domain) but wrapped up in computational design decisions. This insight helps us to see how we need to fundamentally change the way we understand the relation between an application system and its business domain. A key element of this is being able to effectively explain epistemic divergence – the difference between the domain/ontology and applications' epistemology - and this suggests a new framework for systems development.
Finally I indicate how this new framework is well adapted to the brownfield developments of today unlike the approaches that emerged from the greenfield developments common in the last century.

The focus of this presentation is on two topical areas in particular:

1. have a discussion on system components ... and,
2. have a discussion on the requirements for engineering modelling languages, and the shortcomings of what is available.

I will focus on the first item; system components. Hence the title: ‘Components as a litmus test for your ontology: in particular, your ontological architecture’
I explain why components are a useful litmus test for the quality of your ontological architecture.

This paper firstly reviews the need for a radical shift in the foundations and framework of accounting’s conceptual scheme. It, secondly, proposes that the foundations of the new scheme should be a reference ontology. It outlines a process – ontological analysis – for building this and illustrates how it will work with some examples.

Major metaphysical meta-ontological choices, whether made consciously nor not, influence the overall shape of an ontological architecture. This brief note argues that the development of upper ontologies should include a characterisation of their architecture in terms of these choices and their impact. How this might work is illustrated here with examples of two major choices, these are: Perdurantism versus Endurantism and Presentism versus Eternalism.

This is a report of the results of the Synthesised TOVE Persons Ontology (STPO) project. This project’s goal was a synthesis of a Persons Ontology from the TOronto Virtual Enterprise (TOVE) project’s Organisation Ontology. The report is both an introduction to the interim ontology developed by the project and also a summary of its development.

This is, in essence, the project initiation paper for the CEO Project. Its main concern is explaining the project’s aims, how it intends to achieve them and the methodological framework within which the project will work. It explains the origins, conception and motivation for the project and gives an outline of the management framework for the project, in particular the first synthesis stage. It clarifies the terms of the art and describes the nature of ontological analysis. It also characterises the requirements that shape it and the meta-ontological choices and analytic styles that underlie it. Finally, it describes the potential applications and the next steps.

More and more enterprises are currently undertaking projects to integrate their applications. They are finding that one of the more difficult tasks facing them is determining how the data from one application matches semantically with the data from the other applications. Currently there are few methodologies for undertaking this task – most commercial projects just rely on experience and intuition. Taking semantically heterogeneous databases as the prototypical situation, this paper describes how ontology (in the traditional metaphysical sense) can contribute to delivering a more efficient and effective process of matching by providing a framework for the analysis, and so the basis for a methodology. It delivers not only a better process for matching, but the process also gives a better result. This paper describes a couple of examples of this: how the analysis encourages a kind of generalisation that reduces complexity and how ontological relativity can be used to enhance this. Finally, it suggests that the benefits are not just restricted to individual integration projects: that the process produces models which can be used as to construct a universal reference ontology – for general use in a variety of types of projects.

This paper is a case study that describes how the Business Object Reference Ontology (BORO) approach works in practice. It describes in detail a selected part of the work using the approach that has been going on in the EPISTLE community for several years. This will help people better understand not just the benefits of using the approach, but also what it is and how it is applied. It will also illustrate the kinds of results it gives - by providing specific examples of the kind of very general patterns this type of analysis typically produces.

This paper examines the development of a conceptual model that defines Shell’s information requirements - the Downstream Data Model (DDM). The model has its roots in a framework based on the notion of ontological commitment and the focus of the analysis seeks to provide useful insights into the metaphysical aspects relevant to the creation and deployment of the DDM – primarily that related to the extensional nature of the model. The impact of this choice and the methodology employed in the production of the model is examined through example patterns covering spatial and temporal dissectiveness and the use of powerclasses. Having been through the experience of conceptual model development, the work concludes that the separation of the implementational and epistemological ‘gloss’ from a studied understanding of ontological commitment is a necessary evolution of practice in conceptual modelling.

A presentation on the MOD Ontology. Topics covered: MOD Ontology Team, Background on MOD Ontology (Why we started it – What it’s founded on – IDEAS), The BORO Method, The MOD Ontology Demonstrator.

Responsive, agile, collaborative planning and execution is a key requirement for the development of a successful Network Enabled Capability (NEC), whether at the national or international level. This paper makes the case that it is not possible to achieve this agility without solving the semantic interoperability problem. The semantic issues facing NATO’s Network Enabled Capability (NNEC) are also faced by its members in their national NECs. There are currently many proposed strategies attempting to address these issues. Finding the one that will provide the hoped for integration and at the same time only cause minimal changes to existing infrastructure is a major challenge. In this situation it is vital to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of a strategy. This paper presents the findings from a project tasked with both identifying a strategy and demonstrating its effectiveness - the Joint Tactical Air Defence Integration System (JTADIS) project. This project was funded by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) and undertaken by QinetiQ – the semantic analysis was undertaken by BORO Solutions.

There is a well understood requirement for semantic interoperability within NATO and an emerging strategy to address it. One of the strategy’s key components – the ‘semantic description’ – requires further clarification. What is less well recognised is that this ‘semantic description’ can also be viewed as a component of a wider strategic requirement for semantic modernisation. This paper describes how the semantic modernisation techniques of layering and harvesting provide a strong foundation for the production of semantic descriptions. It describes two projects that illustrate how these techniques are being used to do this. Finally, it reflects upon how this could help to refine the current NATO NEC (NNEC) semantic interoperability strategy.

When we embed the building of an ontology into an information system development or maintenance process, then the question arises as to how one should construct the content of the ontology. One of the choices is whether the construction process should focus on the mining of the ontology from existing resources or should be the result of speculation (‘starting with a blank sheet of paper’). I present some arguments for choosing mining over speculation and then look at the implications this has for legacy modernisation.

This paper describes the precisification of the notion of customer developed within the Core Enterprise Ontology (CEO) Project. The paper first benchmarks the current state of the art. It reviews the three main ways in which current applications attempt to specify the type of customer – highlighting their attractions and inadequacies and ranking them in terms of precision. It then outlines a more precise interpretation of customer, indicating why and where this improvement is needed. The interpretation is based upon the mereology of organisations developed within the CEO Project and an analysis by Margaret Gilbert of the nature of agreements.

An overview of 42 Objects' approach to Business Ontology Based Software Development that aims to secure a measure of agreement on:

• What philosophical ontology is,
• Whether, and how, ontology can assist in object oriented software development,
• What philosophical ontology can add to the debate on the mapping between objects in the real world and system objects,
• What the key obstacles to the deployment of ontology are