This paper firstly reviews the need for a radical shift in the foundations and framework of accounting’s conceptual scheme. It, secondly, proposes that the foundations of the new scheme should be a reference ontology. It outlines a process – ontological analysis – for building this and illustrates how it will work with some examples.

Major metaphysical meta-ontological choices, whether made consciously nor not, influence the overall shape of an ontological architecture. This brief note argues that the development of upper ontologies should include a characterisation of their architecture in terms of these choices and their impact. How this might work is illustrated here with examples of two major choices, these are: Perdurantism versus Endurantism and Presentism versus Eternalism.

This is a report of the results of the Synthesised TOVE Persons Ontology (STPO) project. This project’s goal was a synthesis of a Persons Ontology from the TOronto Virtual Enterprise (TOVE) project’s Organisation Ontology. The report is both an introduction to the interim ontology developed by the project and also a summary of its development.

This is, in essence, the project initiation paper for the CEO Project. Its main concern is explaining the project’s aims, how it intends to achieve them and the methodological framework within which the project will work. It explains the origins, conception and motivation for the project and gives an outline of the management framework for the project, in particular the first synthesis stage. It clarifies the terms of the art and describes the nature of ontological analysis. It also characterises the requirements that shape it and the meta-ontological choices and analytic styles that underlie it. Finally, it describes the potential applications and the next steps.

More and more enterprises are currently undertaking projects to integrate their applications. They are finding that one of the more difficult tasks facing them is determining how the data from one application matches semantically with the data from the other applications. Currently there are few methodologies for undertaking this task – most commercial projects just rely on experience and intuition. Taking semantically heterogeneous databases as the prototypical situation, this paper describes how ontology (in the traditional metaphysical sense) can contribute to delivering a more efficient and effective process of matching by providing a framework for the analysis, and so the basis for a methodology. It delivers not only a better process for matching, but the process also gives a better result. This paper describes a couple of examples of this: how the analysis encourages a kind of generalisation that reduces complexity and how ontological relativity can be used to enhance this. Finally, it suggests that the benefits are not just restricted to individual integration projects: that the process produces models which can be used as to construct a universal reference ontology – for general use in a variety of types of projects.

This paper is a case study that describes how the Business Object Reference Ontology (BORO) approach works in practice. It describes in detail a selected part of the work using the approach that has been going on in the EPISTLE community for several years. This will help people better understand not just the benefits of using the approach, but also what it is and how it is applied. It will also illustrate the kinds of results it gives - by providing specific examples of the kind of very general patterns this type of analysis typically produces.