Modern business organizations experience increasing challenges in the development and evolution of their enterprise systems. Typical problems include legacy re-engineering, systems integration/interoperability, and the architecting of the enterprise. At the heart of all these problems is enterprise modeling. Many enterprise modeling approaches have been proposed in the literature with some based on ontology. Few however adopt a foundational ontology to underpin a range of enterprise models in a consistent and coherent manner. Fewer still take data-driven re-engineering as their natural starting point for modeling. This is the approach taken by Business Object Reference Ontology (BORO). It has two closely intertwined components: a foundational ontology and a re-engineering methodology. These were originally developed for the re-engineering of enterprise systems and subsequently evolved into approaches to enterprise architecture and systems integration. Together these components are used to systematically unearth reusable and generalized business patterns from existing data. Most of these patterns have been developed for the enterprise context and have been successfully applied in several commercial projects within the financial, defense, and oil and gas industries. BORO's foundational ontology is grounded in philosophy and its metaontological choices (including perdurantism, extensionalism, and possible worlds) follow well-established theories. BORO's re-engineering methodology is rooted in the philosophical notion of grounding; it emerged from the practice of deploying its foundational ontology and has been refined over the last 25 years. This paper presents BORO and its application to enterprise modeling.

An overview of BORO Foundational Ontology’s Meta-ontological Choices. This covers:

• Background - BORO as an extensional ontology for business systems
• The context for metaphysical choices
• How does philosophy characterise the different metaphysics? Metaphysics through the eyes of philosophy textbooks
• BORO’s metaphysical choices
• Top level patterns - that emerge as a result of the choices
• Re-engineering the companies house data - an example of the re-engineering process assocaited with the choices
• Company - an example of the result of the choices
• Higher order types - one of BORO's metaphysical choices

This paper presents a report on work in progress of a Synthesis of (selected) State of the Art Enterprise Ontologies (SSAEO) – which aims to produce a Base Enterprise Ontology to be used as the foundation for the construction of a Core Enterprise Ontology (CEO). The synthesis is intended to harvest the insights from the selected ontologies, building upon their strengths and eliminating – as far as possible – their weaknesses. One of the main achievements of this work is the development of the notion of a person (entities that can acquire rights and obligations) enabling the integration of a number of lower level concepts. In addition, we have already been able to identify some of the common ‘mistakes’ in current enterprise ontologies – and propose solutions.

This paper is a report on progress of the CEO project whose goal is to build a state of the art enterprise ontology. The project is currently at the stage of harvesting insights from the best existing enterprise ontologies. The goal of this stage is to synthesise from these a Base Enterprise Ontology. This will then be used as the foundation for the construction of the ‘industrial strength’ Core Enterprise Ontology (CEO). The synthesis is intended to build upon the strengths and eliminating — as far as possible — the weaknesses from the selected ontologies. Among other things, this paper describes one of the main achievements of this work to date: the development of the notion of a person (entities that can acquire rights and obligations) enabling the integration of a number of lower level concepts. In addition, it identifies some of the common ‘mistakes’ in current enterprise ontologies — and proposes solutions.

This book is motivated by the belief that “a better understanding of ontology, epistemology, and teleology” is essential for enabling Modelling and Simulation (M&S) systems to reach the next level of ‘intelligence’. This chapter focuses on one broad category of M&S systems where the connection is more concrete; ones where building an ontology – and, we shall suggest, an epistemology – as an integrated part of their design will enable them to reach the next level of ‘intelligence’. Within the M&S community, this use of ontology is at an early stage; so there is not yet a clear picture of what this will look like. In particular, there is little or no guidance on the kind of ontological architecture that is needed to bring the expected benefits. This chapter aims to provide guidance by outlining some major concerns that shape the ontology and the options for resolving them. The hope is that paying attention to these concerns during design will lead to a better quality architecture, and so enable more ‘intelligent’ systems. It is also hoped that understanding these concerns will lead to a better understanding of the role of ontology in M&S.

This is the second part of an introduction to a series of tutorials that aim to provide a practical introduction for researchers and practitioners to potential for the use of foundational ontologies in industrial applications, based upon an actual application. These tutorials will be based upon industrial work currently being done using the BORO foundational methodology; an ontology-based systems (and data) re-engineering and modernisation approach. The first tutorial tutorial introduced ontology, particularly foundational ontologies. This second part introduces the BORO ontology.

The subsequent tutorials will use this introductory tutorial as a basis, they will walk through a number of illustrative examples of how the BORO methodology has been used to re-engineer data in an industrial context.

The system building process should start with a model of the relevant part of the real world, but most O-O systems work is concerned with the later stages, taking O-O languages as a given and looking at how to use them to build the system. This article discusses the origin of the object paradigm, and demonstrates the value of beginning with real-world modeling using an O-O approach.

Introduction: A presentation of the background for the work concerning MODEM, its origins as part of the IDEAS group effort and the reasons behind starting the work as an effort funded by the Swedish Armed Forces. Discussions around the goal of harmonization and the difficulties presented by having multiple, different, national frameworks.

The starting point: MODAF in its current form: A brief introduction of the MODAF meta-model as well as the IDEAS foundation model and the reasons for modifying MODAF based on a UML profile based meta-model to a non-UML meta-model based on the IDEAS foundation model.

Semantic technology, the road ahead: The semantic basis for IDEAS is presented and how this can improve the utility of framework usage. Examples from the reengineering work are presented as well as how a semantic approach cleared up various areas within the MODAF meta-model.

MODEM, what was done, patterns and examples: The work that resulted in MODEM is presented. The use of semantic patterns is presented as a crucial part of the MODEM reengineering effort. Some of these patterns are presented as well as exemplified. Some examples of MODEM used to model the standard search and rescue example used extensively in framework development are also presented.

Relationship between this effort and other IDEAS foundation based models: The US DoD architecture framework DoDAF 2 DMM has also used the IDEAS foundation model as a basis for development and similarities as well as differences are presented.

Conclusions: Conclusions as well as future directions of this work effort are presented.

Component breakdowns are a vital multi-purpose tool and hence ubiquitous across a range of disciplines. Information systems need to be capable of storing reasonably accurate representations of these breakdowns. Most current information systems have been designed around specific breakdowns, without considering their general underlying formal structure. This is understandable, given the focus on devising the breakdown and that there is not a readily available formal structure to build upon. We make a step towards providing this structure here.

At the core of the notion of a component breakdown is the component as an integral (dependent) part of the composite whole. This leads to a rich formal structure, one that requires careful consideration to capture well enough to support the range of specific breakdowns. If one is not sufficiently aware of this structure, it is difficult to determine what is required to produce a reasonably accurate representation – in particular, one that is sufficiently accurate to support interoperability.

In this report, enabled by the Construction Innovation Hub, we describe this rich formal structure and develop a framework for assessing how well a data model (or ontology) has captured the main elements of the structure. This will enable people to both assess existing models as well as design new models. As a separate exercise, as an illustration, we develop a data model that captures these elements.

Associated with the notion of component (as an integral, dependent part) is the notion of replaceable part (see Appendix A for more details). We do not characterise this here but will do so in a later report.

An overview of the digitalisation levels being used in the Nation Digital Twin (NDT) programme.

This presentation describes the Top level Ontology (TLO) that is being developed for the Information Management framework (IMF). It starts with a brief outline of how the TLO emerged from the work on the IMF. It notes the initial focus on providing a foundation for Euclidean standards. It touches on the foundation - the core constructional ontology - built from a unified constructor theory with three elements: set, sum and tuple constructors. It then looks at the data components of the TLO and how these are used to build four-dimensional space time: taking in mereotopology, chronology and worldlines.
Presentation Structure:

• Introducing the IMF Team
• Background
  • Information Management Framework
  • Choice-based framework
• TLO Initial Use
• Situating the TLO in the IMF
• Data Section: Core Constructional Ontology
• Data Section: Top Level Ontology

The digitalisation journey that takes us to semantically seamlessly interoperating enterprise systems is (at the later stages - where ontology is deployed) a hard road to travel. This presentation aims to highlight some of the main hurdles people will face on the digitalisation journey using a cultural evolution perspective. From this viewpoint, we highlight the radical new practices that need to be adopted along the journey. The presentation looks at the concerns this evolutionary perspective raises. For example, evolutionary contingency. It seems clear that if we don’t adapt in the right way, we will not evolve interoperability. While we have some idea of what the practices are, what the trajectory of the journey is. This is not enough, the community also needs find the means to (horizontally) inherit these. The presentation then does a quick tour around so of the new practices that need to be adopted.

This presentation introduces the survey of top-level ontologies. It provides an overview of the context in which it was produced and reviews its contents.

Presentation Structure:

1. Context
2. Candidate Top-level Ontologies
3. Assessment Framework
4. Summary

BORO is a metaphysically grounded foundational ontology developed specifically for use with computer systems (a foundational ontology is a system of general domain-independent ontological categories that can form a foundation for domain-specific ontologies; some but not all of these are grounded in metaphysics) and an associated methodology for legacy re-engineering systems. It emerged from a number of system replacement projects that started in the late 1980s. It was developed to mine the ontology-based conceptual models from legacy systems for use in the development of next generation systems.

Once the re-engineering methodology was established in the initial projects, questions arose as to where it could usefully be deployed. To answer this, it would help to understand why it was effective; after all, it would be hard to find a more abstract and esoteric subject than metaphysics – and one that does not immediately seem related to computing. Furthermore metaphysics is a broad subject, it would be good to understand better what areas of metaphysics are important, why they are important and how they are useful. It would also be good to have a better idea of where in computing metaphysics could play a useful role.

The purpose of this position paper is to sketch out how BORO has, over the decades, developed a view that provides answers to these questions (with no claim that this is the only way to answer them). This view is framed by two related themes. The first is that a new kind of information quality – which we label ‘computerate’ – is needed for computer systems and the second that metaphysics provides the right apparatus for grounding foundational ontologies that can be used to produce this ‘computerate’ information.

This presentation introduces the Core Constructional Ontology (CCO). It firstly provides the background to the development of this ontology. It secondly, provides a summary of the approach to the development, looking at its key features and giving an overview of the formalisation.