Ontology Construction - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 60

deleting commitments that bind their current and
future behaviors.
The work of Lee (1988) looks at language acts
in the bureaucratic office, viewing language not
as a mechanism for information transfer but as a
mechanism for social interaction and control. He
presents a logic-based representation of deontic
notions - authorization, permission, prohibition
and the like - and shows how this can be used to
model cooperative work in the office.
Yu and Mylopoulos (1994) have proposed a
framework for modeling organizations as being
made of social actors that are intentional, hav-
ing motivations, wants and beliefs and strategic,
evaluating their opportunities and vulnerabilities
with respect to each other. This formal model is
used to explore alternative process designs in
business reengineering.
The Enterprise Ontology is a collection of terms
and definitions relevant to business enterprises
modeling the enterprise in an organization wide-
view manner that then can be used as a basis for
decision making (Uschold and King 1995).
The major role of the Enterprise Ontology is
to act as a communication medium; in particular,
between: different people, including users and
developers, across different enterprises and differ-
ent computational systems (Uschold et al. 1996).
The Enterprise Ontology was developed as
“ a collaborative effort to provide a method and a
computer tool set for enterprise modeling ”, using
strong facilities for integration 1 , communication 2 ,
flexibility 3 and support 4 , with the aim of providing
and assuring a enterprise-wide view an a common
understanding at all levels (Uschold et al, 1996).
The Enterprise Ontology presents several sec-
tions: Meta Ontology and Time, Activity, Plan,
Capability, and Resource, Organization, Strategy
and Marketing and associated concepts and rela-
tions between them.
In the same manner, ontology defined terms
are presented as a core asset for term conformance
within the ontology itself. Uschold et al. (1996)
defined the formal terms, addressing the Enterprise

Ontology, for different areas of interest (activity,
organization, strategy, marketing and time).
The TOVE Enterprise Modeling project (Fox
et al, 1997) intended to create the next generation
Enterprise, a Common Sense Enterprise Model.
The TOVE authors consider an organization to be
a set of constraints on the activities performed by
agents. This view follows that of Weber (1987)
who views the process of bureaucratization as a
shift from management based on self-interest and
personalities to one based on rules and procedures.
The TOVE model considers an organization to
be a set of constraints on the activities performed
by agents. In particular, an organization consists
of a set of divisions and subdivisions (recursive
definition), a set of organization-agents (said to
be members of a division of the organization), a
set of roles that the members play in the organiza-
tion, and an organization-goal tree that specifies
the goals (and their decomposition into sub goals)
the members try to achieve. An organization-agent
(or in short agent) plays one or more roles. Each
role is defined with a set of goals that the role
is created to fulfill and is allocated with proper
authority at the level that the role can achieve its
goals. Agents perform activities in the organiza-
tion, each of which may consume resource (e.g.
materials, labors, tools, etc.) and there is a set of
constraints that constrain the activities (Fox et
al, 1997).
An approach to engineering ontologies be-
gins with defining an ontology's requirements;
this is in the form of questions that an ontology
must be able to answer and can be referred as the
competency of the ontology. The second step is
to define the terminology of the ontology - its
objects, attributes, and relations (Fox et al. 1997).
Therefore the resulting diagram (containing
objects, attributes, and relations) can be used to
represent organization actors, agents and actions
and the relation between. However, it does not
validate the processes in which they are involved.
Dietz proposes a “stronger” form of Enter-
prise Ontology. In fact, true semantic can only