The concept of company-specific ontology for information integration: literature review and demonstration in a case study

Integrating business information from a growing number of heterogeneous business information systems is a topic of growing interest in organisations. In this paper, we present a novel approach that is geared at the particular information needs of a single user. We use ontology and knowledge graph, two recent concepts from the field of Semantic Web, to develop an approach that uses a company-specific ontology to build a user-specific knowledge graph. We review extant literature on enterprise ontologies and show that the existing (generic) ontologies are not suited for today’s complex organisational information system landscapes and the particular information needs of employees. Using a case study of an insurance company, we demonstrate how a company-specific ontology needs to be tailored to the specific organisational situation thus addressing both challenges, the heterogenous information sources (software systems) and the particular needs of the recipient (user).