A view of enterprise information systems based on contextual ontologies

When we deal with different information systems in an enterprise, we unfortunately deal with problems of integrating and developing information systems and databases in heterogeneous, distributed environments. In the East decade, the ontologies are used in order make understandable the data, and to be a support for system´s interoperability problems. As shared common vocabulary, the ontologies play a key role in resolving partially the semantic conflicts among systems. Since, different applications of the same domain have several representations of the same real world entities, our aim is to propose MurO: a multi-representation ontology. The latter is an ontology characterizing the concepts by a variable set of properties (static and dynamic) or attributes in several contexts and in several scales of granularity, We introduce first the MurO formalism. Then, we show its use with the ongoing EISMO (enterprise information system multi-representation ontology) project and its relevance for answering the motivating requirements