An Ontology of Quality for Enterprise Modelling

Although there are many quality domains in which ideas and concepts about quality are represented, these representations are often informal. The TOVE Quality Ontology is the formal representation (using first-order logic) of terms, relationships, and axioms about quality which are generic beyond any specific quality domain. The assumption that quality is “conformance to requirements” is used to decompose the domain of quality into sub-domains of measurement, quality analysis, identification, and traceability. An ontological engineering methodology of posing ontological scope, stating competency questions, constructing data models and axioms, and visualization of the answering of competency questions is demonstrated with an example from the engineering of the traceability ontology.