An XML Architecture for Operational Enterprise Ontologies

What is an operational enterprise ontology, why would a company embrace it, and how can it be implemented? These are the issues addressed in this paper. An enterprise ontology answers the following question: What kinds of things should we represent in enterprise systems? It becomes operational when its specification is explicitly recorded and actively used by applications at run time. The primary motivation for considering an operational enterprise ontology is its ability to support application reuse across enterprise systems. XML is an emerging technology for recording, processing, and exchanging data. This paper illustrates how XML technologies can be used to implement operational enterprise ontologies.