MENTOR - A methodology for enterprise reference ontology development

Ontologies facilitate the computational understanding, communication and seamless interoperability between people and organizations. They allow key concepts and terms relevant to a given domain to be identified and defined in an open and unambiguous way. Therefore, ontologies facilitate the use and exchange of data, information, and knowledge among people and organizations, towards intelligent systems interoperability. Tasks on distributed and heterogeneous systems demand support from more than one ontology. Multiple ontologies need to be accessed by the same, but also different systems. The distributed nature of ontology development has led to dissimilar ontologies for the same or overlapping domains. Thus, various parties with different ontologies often do not understand each other. To solve these problems, it is necessary to use ontology mapping geared for interoperability. This paper proposes a methodology to support the development of a common reference ontology for a group of enterprises sharing a business domain. This methodology is based on the concept of Mediator Ontology (MO), which assists the semantic transformations among each enterprise's ontology and the referential one. The MO enables each organization to keep its own terminology, glossary and ontological structures, providing seamless communication and interaction with the others. A use case is described and the proposed methodology demonstrated.