This tutorial presents an introduction to the BORO methodology, an ontology-based systems engineering approach. The authors present both the ontological foundations of the approach as well as business examples of the application of this approach.

The amount of data that is being made available on the Web is increasing. This provides business organisations with the opportunity to acquire large datasets in order to offer novel information services or to better market existing products and services. Much of this data is now publicly available (e.g., thanks to initiatives such as Open Government Data). The challenge from a corporate perspective is to make sense of the third party data and transform it so that it can more easily integrate with their existing corporate data or with datasets with a different provenance. This paper presents research-in-progress aimed at semantically transforming raw data on U.K. registered companies. The approach adopted is based on BORO (a 4D foundational ontology and re-engineering method) and the target technological platform is Neo4J (a graph database). The primary challenges encountered are (1) re-engineering the raw data into a 4D ontology and (2) representing the 4D ontology into a graph database. The paper will discuss such challenges and explain the transformation process that is currently being adopted.

The aim of this tutorial is to provide a context for BORO in terms of a number of standards that it has influenced.

A small number of top ontologies have been developed over the last decade or two. They are now starting to be implemented in IT systems.
This talk will argue that they have the potential to play a significant part in IT; and that exploiting this depends upon a better understanding of their scope and how they can be deployed.
It will argue that their scope potentially extends across a significant proportion of the IT market and that this claim is best understood in the historical context of previous information revolutions.
Hopefully this will facilitate a better understanding of why top ontologies can be useful and how they can be deployed.

This is the first 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. This first part provides an introduction to ontology, particularly foundational ontologies. The second part of the introduction 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.

This walks through a project where the BORO methodology was used to re-engineer data in a defence architectural framework standard - MODAF. This standard has a UML metamodel. UML has (to an extent) a formal semantics, but was not designed to provide a real world semantics. Hence, MODAF at the start had no top level real world semantics, though it had started to establish middle level real world semantics, within UML’s top level formal semantics. This presentation explaines how MODEM used IDEAS (BORO) to bring the real world semantics in. This includes a detailed study of the improvements needed to the UML model for behaviour.
This is part of a series of tutorials that walk through examples that illustrate how the BORO methodology has been used to re-engineer data in an industrial context.

This tutorial provides an illustrative case study of how the BORO methodology has been used to re-engineer a paradigm shift in the foundations of accounting. It provides a nice example of how a shift in technology creates an opportunity for a new conceptual structure.
This is part of a series of tutorials that walk through examples that illustrate how the BORO methodology has been used to re-engineer data in an industrial context.

This tutorial provides an illustrative case study of how the BORO methodology has been used to improve precision. The case study looks at work done on the ontology of 'Air Control Means' a construct used in military air traffic control as part of a wider air defence ontology. It has these ontological themes; semantic vagueness, rational reconstruction, increased precision, shift from a pen and paper paradigm, fruitfulness.
This is part of a series of tutorials that walk through examples that illustrate how the BORO methodology has been used to re-engineer data in an industrial context.

This tutorial provides an illustrative example of how the BORO methodology has been used to re-engineer and improve ‘structural constraints’ in existing frameworks. It provides a nice example of how an ontological analysis can reveal the constraints and identify how they can be improved. The case study is taken from a project that developed a common data foundation for an oil and gas enterprise. One area under analysis was cost management. The starting point for the analysis was the NORSOK Z-014 Standard cost coding system. The tutorial looks at its the structural constraints were identified and remedied.
This is part of a series of tutorials that walk through examples that illustrate how the BORO methodology has been used to re-engineer data in an industrial context.

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 Upstream Oil and Gas industry is formed of a complex network of contractual structures, highly specialised technical disciplines and technologies that interact across multilateral supply chains for exploration and production of hydrocarbons. The complexity comes with a number of technical, social and environmental risks may affect entire regions and countries. One of the key challenges that organisations face in this industry, is ensuring interoperability across organisational and functional boundaries due to the highly stratified supply chain and deeply specialised technical domains that it creates. This presentation will describe the strategy used to build a robust common foundation for the data; at the centre of which is a stable and resilient data architecture for the oil industry. It will explain how this was achieved including the use of structured foundational design principles and industry data standards including ISO 15926, IDEAS and MODEM.

The conceptual modelling community has no clear, agreed semantics for its models; or more plainly, there is no general agreement on what the models model. One mainstream proposal is that they model concepts, but there is no clear semantics for this; no clear description of what concepts are and how they relate to their domain. This creates theoretical problems; for example, it is difficult to build accurate meta-models, as these have to encompass the semantic structure. It also creates practical problems; practitioners will approach building a model of the concept of a business differently from modelling the business itself. We aim to exploit research undertaken in philosophy to construct a framework that classifies the broad semantic options. Using this we identify two major options: concept-mediated and direct-domain semantics. We focus on the concept-mediated option and examine how philosophy has analysed what a concept is; identifying three main options and exploring the issues they raise. While not wishing to advocate choices at this stage, we note that the concept-mediated view - in particular, the version prevalent in conceptual modelling, that concepts are representations – faces serious challenges as a practical semantics for modelling and languages.

This tutorial walks through an illustrative case study of how the BORO methodology has been used to radical refactor data in an industrial context. The example is taken from work done reviewing the current practices and artefacts used for the information modelling of the Geospatial and Temporal References (G&TR) in the UK surface ship community and investigating the ways in which the use of ontologies can help to improve them. The themes of this tutorial are refactoring and rational reconstruction.
This is part of a series of tutorials that walk through examples that illustrate how the BORO methodology has been used to re-engineer data in an industrial context.

BORO Solutions applies military-strength semantics in 'Clean' and 'Pure' approach to complex oil country data landscape. Industrial ontology leverages Department of defense framework.

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.