Towards an Operational REA Business Ontology

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 chapter 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 chapter discusses the choices made in redesigning REA and in transforming REA’s UML representation into an OWL representation. It is also illustrated how this new formal representation of the REA-ontology can be used to support ontology-driven supply chain collaboration.