A Program for Building a State of the Art Enterprise Ontology:

Report on Progress

This paper is a report on progress of the CEO project whose goal is to build a state of the art enterprise ontology. The project is currently at the stage of harvesting insights from the best existing enterprise ontologies. The goal of this stage is to synthesise from these a Base Enterprise Ontology. This will then be used as the foundation for the construction of the ‘industrial strength’ Core Enterprise Ontology (CEO). The synthesis is intended to build upon the strengths and eliminating — as far as possible — the weaknesses from the selected ontologies. Among other things, this paper describes one of the main achievements of this work to date: the development of the notion of a person (entities that can acquire rights and obligations) enabling the integration of a number of lower level concepts. In addition, it identifies some of the common ‘mistakes’ in current enterprise ontologies — and proposes solutions.