Enterprise ontologies: Review and an activity theory approach

This paper provides an alternative, theory-based approach for generating an enterprise ontology, using activity theory. Activity theory, based on psychology, provides a template-based approach in capturing the context of individual activity in an organization. In particular, activity theory uses eight key class concepts: activity, outcome, subject, object, community, rules, tools and division of labor, as a means of organizing and capturing context information. Activity theory is compared with other previously proposed enterprise ontologies, including “ARIS,” “REA,” “The Enterprise Ontology,” “TOVE,” and “Enterprise Ontology.” This activity theory approach is found to consider information typically not included in enterprise ontologies, but likely of interest in most any enterprise.