Towards Ontology-driven Information Systems: Redesign and Formalization of the REA Ontology

F. Gailly () and Geert Poels ()

Working Papers of Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Belgium from Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration

Abstract: It is widely recognized that ontologies can be used to support the semantic integration and interoperability of heterogeneous information systems. Resource Event Agent (REA) is a well-known business ontology that was proposed for ontology-driven enterprise system development. However, the current specification is neither sufficiently explicit nor formal, and thus difficult to operationalize for use in ontology-driven business information systems. In this paper REA is redesigned and formalized following a methodology based on the reengineering extension of the METHONTOLOGY framework for ontology development. The redesign is focused on developing a UML representation of REA that improves upon existing representations and that can easily be transformed into a formal representation. The formal representation of REA is developed in OWL. The paper discusses the choices made in redesigning REA and in transforming REA’s UML representation into a OWL representation.

Keywords: Business Ontologies; Interoperability; Ontology Engineering; UML; OWL (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2007-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rug:rugwps:07/445

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