Ontology-based enterprise knowledge integration

Enterprises are getting more knowledge intensive, and the integration of various types of knowledge becomes a challenge. It has been accepted that ontology is an important concept for knowledge integration. In this paper, three issues have been addressed: (i) ontology construction which includes the method and implementation of a Concept Map based ontology construction, and the evaluation of the constructed ontology; (ii) a dynamic workflow, in which an ontology-based workflow system is used to accumulate knowledge during the business process, and (iii) the rules and constraints used for knowledge representation, in which a Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is used to group the rules and constraints into different classes executed by a inference engine. Two cases have been studied using the above methods and tools. Case one is an acquisition prototype for the aircraft industry. The other is for an on-going bar code management project carried out by this research team. Both cases show that the developed methods can be used for knowledge integration.