A Comparison and Integration of Ontologies Suitable for Interoperability Extension of SCOR Model

Abstract

Systems with numerous stakeholders are very common in contemporary business. They can grow pretty fast in all aspects, including number of different semantic domain they use, and the way they interpret them. Supply Chain Management systems (SCM) are not an exception, at all. In order to achieve unique interpretation of information between stakeholders, reference models are made. Particular popular one for SCM is SCOR (Supply Chain Operations Reference) model. However, lack of semantic richness and precision has led to the need to expand the SCOR model. In the literature and practice often used as a solution for this problem is applying semantically rich ontologies in order to contribute a precise definition, interpretation and expansion of the domains within the SCOR model. Use of ontologies raises the question of possibility of their mutual integration and interoperability, which in this paper is processed as a comparative analysis of their concepts, similarities and differences (for three commonly used ontologies: IDEON, TOVE and Enterprise). We developed a model that represents the basis for further integration of these three ontologies and for further interoperability expansion of SCOR model, therefore the SCM. This model is described at the end of this paper.