The most commonly used definition of an ontology is “an explicit specification of a conceptualization” (Gruber 1993). Often, a distinction is made between upper-level ontologies and domain ontologies (van Heijst, Schreiber, and Wielinga 1997). The knowledge captured as part of a generic or upper-level ontology applies across domains. Examples of such ontologies are the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology (Wand and Weber 1990), Sowa's upper-level ontology (Sowa 1999), and the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) (Guizzardi 2005). On the other hand, the knowledge captured by a domain ontology is specific to a particular domain, such as biology (the Gene Ontology) (Ashburner et al. 2000) or social networking (the Friend-of-A-Friend ontology [FOAF]) (Brickley and Miller 2014). Enterprise ontologies are domain ontologies that explicitly specify the “essence of the operation of an enterprise” (Dietz 2006). Three important uses of domain...
