Since 1973 technological, political, regulatory, and economic forces have been changing the worldwide economy in a fashion comparable to the changes experienced during the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution. As in the nineteenth century, we are experiencing declining costs, increaing average (but decreasing marginal) productivity of labor, reduced growth rates of labor income, excess capacity, and the requirement for downsizing and exit. The last two decades indicate corporate internal control systems have failed to deal effectively with these changes, especially slow growth and the requirement for exit. The next several decades pose a major challenge for Western firms and political systems as these forces continue to work their way through the worldwide economy.

This paper is intended to serve as a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field concerned with the design and use of ontologies. We observe that disparate backgrounds, languages, tools, and techniques are a major barrier to effective communication among people, organisations, and/or software systems. We show how the development and implementation of an explicit account of a shared understanding (i.e. an `ontology') in a given subject area, can improve such communication, which in turn, can give rise to greater reuse and sharing, inter-operability, and more reliable software. After motivating their need, we clarify just what ontologies are and what purposes they serve. We outline a methodology for developing and evaluating ontologies, first discussing informal techniques, concerning such issues as scoping, handling ambiguity, reaching agreement and producing de nitions. We then consider the bene ts of and describe, a more formal approach. We re-visit the scoping phase, and discuss the role of formal languages and techniques in the specification, implementation and evaluation of ontologies. Finally, we review the state of the art and practice in this emerging field,

on and off from autumn 1987 until summer 1993. One of us [PV] gives very special thanks to his lovely wife Pauline for insisting from the outset on the significance of this enterprise. The Aiken Computation Laboratory of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; the Computer Science Department

technologies, including enterprise integration, application service provider, storage service provider, and peer-to-peer computing. We maintain that Grid concepts and technologies complement and have much to contribute to these other approaches.

Today’s business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems

Rome. early China, and the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe is used to investigate the hypotheses. It is often assumed that an economy of private enterprise has an automatic bias towards innovation, but this is not so. It has a bias only towards profit. [HOBSBAWM 1969, p. 401 When conjectures

in industries along with our current work towards realizing market-oriented resource allocation of Clouds as realized in Aneka enterprise Cloud technology. Furthermore, we highlight the difference between High Performance Computing (HPC) workload and Internet-based services workload. We also describe a meta

in current computer technology. Ontologies provide a shared and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between people and application systems. Therefore, they may play a major role in supporting information exchange processes in various areas. This book discusses the role ontologies

Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the computer science community, and its importance is being recognized in a multiplicity of research fields and application areas, including knowledge engineering, database design and integration, information retrieval and extraction. We

Data integration is the problem of combining data residing at different sources, and providing the user with a unified view of these data. The problem of designing data integration systems is important in current real world applications, and is characterized by a number of issues