Ontology-Based Fragmented Company Knowledge Integration: Multi-aspect Ontology Building

Abstract

Early steps of ongoing digital transformation in companies is often driven by local business needs and results in usage of various information systems aimed at assisting in solving particular tasks. However, this leads to a dead end and further transformation is not possible without integration, what, in turn, requires interoperability support. The solution that seems to be the most simple is to use one complex system. However, various legacy systems used in various departments of companies have accumulated large volumes of corporate information and knowledge that are not easy to transfer into another system. Besides, spending time of specialists to learn different systems instead of those they are used to is not the best idea either. Though, the problem technical interoperability support is solved through usage of commonly accepted standards, the semantic interoperability is still an issue. In the previous paper, research results related to selection of the most appropriate solution for building a common information model enabling seamless knowledge exchange preserving existing information models was presented. This paper makes a step further through building a multi-aspect ontology taking into account differences between terminologies used in various information systems.