Enterprise Ontology based Artefact Management

Abstract

Structuring enterprise information and supporting knowledge management is a growing application field for enterprise ontologies. Based on an industrial case from automotive supplier industries, the paper proposes the use of an ontology for artefact management in engineering of dependable systems, illustrated by the tool ArtefactManager. Navigation and search in the Artefact-Manager is performed using categorizations of artefacts by means of so-called taxonomic paths through the enterprise ontology. One of the main challenges is to permit evolution at least for those parts of the ontology which are used for categorizing artefacts. This paper introduces an approach to support the evolution process on the taxonomy level in conjunction with the level of categorizations.