Ontological Approaches to Enterprise Applications

One of the main challenges in building enterprise applications has been to balance between general functionality and domain/scenario-specific customization. The lack of formal ways to extract, distill, and standardize the embedded domain knowledge has been a barrier to minimizing the cost of customization. Using ontology, as many would hope, will give application builders the much needed methodology and standard to achieve the objective of building flexible enterprise solutions [1, 2]. However, even with a rich amount of research and quite a few excellent results on designing and building ontologies [3, 4], there are still gaps to be filled for actual deployment of the technology and concept in a real life commercial environment. The problems are hard especially in those applications that require well-defined semantics in mission critical operations. In this presentation, we introduce two of our projects where ontological approaches are used for enterprise applications. Based on these experiences we discuss the challenges in applying ontology-based technologies to solving business applications.