Using Ontologies and Formal Concept Analysis for Organizing Business Knowledge
Gerd Stumme · 2002
Ontologies provide explicit models of shared conceptualizations, and are useful for modeling formal, semi formal, and informal knowledge needed for communication within a company. As there is typically more than one ontology used in a company (for instance one in each department), techniques are needed to merge ontologies in order to assure cross-company communication. In this paper, we summarize one such approach, called FCA-MERGE. During its development, it turned out that a formal definition of ‘ontology’ is needed. The resulting definition is presented for the first time in detail in this paper.1