Constructing an enterprise ontology for an automotive supplier

This paper presents experiences and conclusions from ontology engineering applied in the automotive suppliers domain. The work focuses on construction of enterprise ontologies to support structuring of enterprise information and knowledge management. Two methods for ontology construction, developed by previous research activities, were used in parallel when developing an ontology for a company in automotive supplier industries. One method is automatic and the other method is a manual approach. A conclusion was that the developed ontologies complemented each other well and therefore the decision was made to merge them for use in the project. The resulting ontology will now be used in several pilot applications.