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The increasing sophistication of today's customers poses certain challenges such as responsiveness, accuracy, predictability and the reliability of service appointing to service providers in both private and public sectors. Reservation management technology is rapidly evolving to address these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the cornerstones of successful organisations has been the optimal use of their workforce. Two types of resources characterise service organisations: front and back office resources. These resources are defined by their capability (i. e., skills), location and availability. Front office resources handle incoming demand whilst the back office resources execute the services related to the demand. Planning of such resources can be carried out at one of three levels: strategic, tactical and operational; referring to long-, medium-, and short-, term planning respectively. The three levels for planning may overlap or may be distinct. Either way there is a flow of information from strategic to tactical and from tactical to operational. The loop is then closed by flow of information from operational back to strategic (see Fig. 3.1). In this context, strategic planning provides information on the overall balance of customer demand with available resource capacity. Tactical planning suggests a coarsegrain allocation of resources to tasks with no consideration given to when those tasks must be executed. And operational planning represents the allocation of specific resources to specific tasks; detailing the specific times of execution. The level of detail required for planning increases as one moves in time from strategic to operational. For strategic planning it is sufficient to analyse resource requirements based on the number of resources and their levels of productivity. On the other hand, for operational planning it is imperative that details such as starting location, preferred working location, scheduled hours, and availability for overtime are identified for accurate deployment to be realised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter is a practical guide to help an organisation ensure that it achieves a realistic benefit from introducing new service chain management technologies into its operations. The focus is on Field Force Automation (FFA) and mobile service workers. The viewpoints expressed are based on the work and experience of Paul Cleaver who served in a number of senior management positions at BT over the last 14 years. The examples are mainly drawn from BT's major transformation of the engineering workforce between the years 1993 to 2002 that Paul headed but also from his experience in subsequent roles including his latest highly successful endeavour in delivering ICT solutions for BT's corporate customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the previous chapter, we examined the concept of resource exchanges based on intelligent agents and marketplaces. In this chapter, we are focusing on how the same distributed decision making models can be used for empowering staff. Human resources are the main resources in a service industry. Success or failure of a service operation is often determined by its personnel management policy. A successful management policy would provide job satisfaction to employees, which will lead to higher morale, productivity and service quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the previous chapter, we examined e-commerce, its impact on service chains and the different strategies that can be adopted in online revenue management. An enabler underlying these emerging areas are several new technologies with the most fundamental one being that of electronic marketplaces. This chapter reviews the state-of-the-art of electronic marketplaces with a focus on the future e-supply chain for both products and services and emerging agentbasedmarketplaces. It also presents frameworks for new concepts such as service resource exchanges which can underpin intra-organisational and inter-organisational service chain management.Agent technologies seem to be well suited to this domain by providing a distributed environment, are network centric, semi-autonomous and collaborative and can communicate with each other to achieve better optimisation with little human intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the emergence of the Internet, electronic commerce (e-commerce), revenue management and especially applications that combine both are becoming increasingly an area of innovation for service industries. E-commerce has introduced efficiencies across the service chain and it has allowed improvements to take place within and across organizations. Revenue management when combined with ecommerce and done online not only improves resource management but it can be used as a strategic tool to gain competitive advantage. This chapter examines the current approaches and future trends in these very exciting and promising areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Chap. 4, we have discussed in detail the concepts of Forecasting and Demand Planning where the focus was primarily forecasting within the enterprise. With interdependencies of businesses it is imperative for organizations to engage in collaborative demand forecasting across their service chains. This chapter defines collaborative forecasting and highlights the challenges faced in carrying out this process across multiple organizations. It establishes the objective of such collaborative effort and details a framework which can be used by all organizations. It also briefly discusses the popular CPFR framework and its potential application in the service industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For IT leaders, the increasing speed of innovation supported by a strong and flexible enterprise-wide software infrastructure, as well as delivering functionally rich and technically robust services is of primary concern. Increasing responsiveness to business changes and growing requirements ultimately require flexible software systems that can embrace such changes. To realise this, business stakeholders and IT executives are focusing on enhancing their older software delivery models. The goal here is to ensure that the enterprises remain competitive and leading. Agile practices in delivery promises to fulfil such a goal. It addresses the need of building business functionality quickly in circumstances of evolving requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Customers should be at the heart of any business. In order to improve processes with customer interaction, businesses have introduced customer relationship management systems. These systems collect large volumes of data about customers which contain valuable information that can allow a business to improve its customer relationships and services. Typically, customer analytics focus on reporting what has happened. However, in order to become pro-active and truly shape the future of a business, it is important to predict what customers want and how they will react. In addition to understanding customers, it is paramount for any enterprise to understand how its business has performed at any given time in the past, now, and in the future. Business Intelligence applications available today focus very much on past performance. However, it is becoming essential that not only is the analysis of business performance done on real-time data, but also actions in response to analysis results can be performed in real time and instantaneously change business process parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, circuit-switched telephony has been the dominant form of telecommunications at home and in the office. More recently, services such as voice over IP, instant messaging and short message services have taken centre stage with the widespread adoption of Internet, mobile and broadband technologies. To a large extent, however, these services have evolved in isolation due to the heterogeneity of legacy networks and computing infrastructures. The industry is now embracing next-generation networks (NGNs) and service delivery platforms (SDPs) as a means to unify and integrate communications with IT applications, web services and business processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of effectiveworkflows is deeply ingrained in virtually every industry today. As businesses become more distributed, there is a need formassively networked workflow tools which is reflected in the emergence of the Service-Oriented Architecture paradigm. This large collection of standards brings into workflow the concept of linking together disparateWeb Services to form composite applications with some integration of human processes. Most implementations of workflow tools, however, require complete adoption at multiple levels of an organisation as well as agreement in standards to enable inter-service communication in heterogeneous environments. This necessitates significant investment in software management solutions, development time and hardware requirements, all of which can lead to inflexible workflow solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The employees within an enterprise performing tasks in the service chain represent the ‘capacity' available and, therefore, directly influence the ability of the chain to process work. This capacity has a number of component parts: the people themselves, their planned attendance and variations - positive through overtime or negative through absence. This ‘net availability' must be maintained accurately, and in real time, to enable effective planning, scheduling and reservation of the capacity further along the chain. As well as making this information available to components and functions within the service chain, employees themselves need to view and manipulate it. Enterprises generally do not have a joined up approach to managing this capacity as an entity, rather managing parts of it separately combining manual human resources (HR) processes with limited system support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last chapter, we discussed the problem of automating and optimising shift allocations to people in order to meet certain service levels. Now that the number and type of people that need to be rostering in on the day have been determined, there is a need for scheduling work to them. The focus of this chapter is on the challenges in implementing an effective work allocation and scheduling system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personnel Shift Scheduling and Rostering problems are found in many different types of organisations and industries including manufacturing, call centres, the airline industry, health services, utilities and the transportation industry. More generally, the importance of an efficient shift scheduling system is critical to any large organisation especially in the service economy where production and consumption normally coincide. The generation of optimised shift and roster patterns is, undeniably, a key instrument for making best use of the resources of a service enterprise. The efficiency of such a system leads to maximisation of the customer experience by matching the demand with the appropriate staffing level and minimisation of the cost by reducing idle time of the resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does Revenue Management (RM) mean and how does it work? In which industries is it being practised already? What is the theory underlying RM1? One might have heard the term applied in the context of the airline industry, but how could it be used in other service industries such as telecommunications? Can it be used in organisations of any size? How much effort would be needed to implement it and how complex is the required technology? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For network centric businesses such as telecommunication providers and utilities, networks form the core of their business and comprise a very expensive asset that needs careful management to fulfil both present and future requirements of customers. Correctly planning and designing the network is essential to the success of such businesses. The network planning and design process can involve planning and design at different levels of detail from high level strategic or business planning through to low level detailed planning and design. Network planning and design forms part of a wider provisioning process encompassing order handling, job tracking, network design and configuration through to order fulfilment and billing. This chapter focuses on the network planning and design process together with a brief examination of the opportunities provided through use of network optimisation techniques therein improving upon results obtained through use of manual techniques alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key goals for service businesses is to find the right balance between the quality of service delivered to its customers and the incurred cost. The quality of service should be as high as possible in order to achieve high customer satisfaction and retention, and this often increases costs. Authorising overtime, for example, to guarantee timely service delivery has financial consequences. However, costs generally should be as small as possible to achieve high profitability. Clearly both objectives are contradictory and often cannot be fully satisfied at the same time due to the constraints on resource utilisation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to traditional manufacturing and supply chain, forecasting in the service industry is in a nascent stage. Forecasting in the service chain is not limited to forecasting of sales, raw material or components but it could be as varied as forecasting internet bandwidth requirement, call volumes at a call centre or the customers walking into restaurant between 8 pm to 9 pm on Saturday evening. The variety and complexity of forecasting requirements changes from business to business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the previous chapter, we provided an overview of the general area of Service ChainManagement and the subjects to be covered in the book.One important source of requirements and inspiration for Service Chain Management applications are the enterprise's customers and their emerging requirements and expectations on customer service. This area also known as Services Marketing has been covered by books focusing on the subject of integrating customer requirements across the service enterprise, see Zeithaml and Bitner (2003). However, we focus here on emerging customer service trends emanating from service digitisation and electronic communications which are increasingly impacting service management systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of the services sector in recent times has been phenomenal with services displacing manufacturing as the main driver of western industrialised economies. However, a disproportionate part of the yearly productivity growth in OECD countries is still due to improvements in manufacturing (Wölfl 2005). In this context, Service OperationsManagement (Johnston and Clark 2001; Schmenner 1995) is becoming increasingly important for companies and government alike to achieve productivity growth and a cost advantage over their domestic and international competitors. This includes technologies and systems for automating and optimising service operations within and across companies which we will refer to them collectively as Service Chain Management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter we presented insights on RFID in manufacturing that we gained during our case studies (see Chap. 4). Following a review of important terminology and a reference model for production processes, we presented the following common use cases for RFID in manufacturing: • Accelerating scan processes • Extending scan processes for quality and efficiency • Extending scan processes for narrowing recalls • Reducing paper-based data management • Automating asset tracking • Reducing back-end interactions • Unifying labels [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter we described six case studies illustrating the use and potential of RFID in the manufacturing industry. In all case studies we first analyzed the current situation on the shop floor. Then we illustrated how the current production could be optimized by applying RFID technology in diverse scenarios. We concluded the case studies with a cost and benefits discussion for each portrayed RFID application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter we gave an overview of an MES and its role within a manufacturer's IT infrastructure. We outlined the typical structure of a manufacturing company along a layered model of the company's processes and supporting IT functionality. Against the background of this model, we presented the functionality of an MES and described how it is integrated into the enterprise information infrastructure. We discussed tasks and functions of an MES in detail, as well as the relevant processes for an MES. We set a special focus on data collection during manufacturing, which covers technologies for data capturing as well as data processing and communication on lower system levels. Here we explicitly addressed integration issues with devices on the plant floor. The chapter ended with a discussion of RFID's impact on various functional areas of an MES, including why these functional areas are influenced by RFID technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter we first described the upcoming trends in manufacturing and ERP. The strict application of the classic three-layer architecture (illustrated in Chap. 1) is no longer feasible in modern IT environments. There is a clear demand for more flexible, service-oriented architectures that allow, for example, an ERP system to directly interact with an RFID reader on the shop floor. Therefore, in this chapter we described how a modern architecture and core technologies for real-world awareness can be designed to meet this new demand. We used SAP software as an example for our illustration of a modern architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this chapter was to lay the foundations for the upcoming discussion of RFID in manufacturing. A key observation concerns the fact that RFID develops its full potential only if it is tightly integrated with any existing IT infrastructures. A tight integration with existing ERP and MES systems makes it particularly more likely that RFID will lead to concrete and local productivity improvements in the short and medium terms. Such concrete improvements—especially if they are purely intra-enterprise, i.e., independent of any coordination with supply chain partners—facilitate the adoption decision considerably. Cost-benefit calculations are less complex, and there is less uncertainty about the medium-term profitability of an investment in RFID technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic resources, such as ontologies and taxonomies, are used in various domains to facilitate information exchange between people and software applications. However, in many cases, accessing a single semantic resource is no longer adequate. Consequently, new initiatives targeting the interoperability and integration of existing semantic resources have been recently increasingly investigated. This paper describes the methodology used during the FUNSIEC project to develop an Open Semantic Infrastructure for the European Construction Sector (OSIECS). This infrastructure aims to facilitate integration and interoperability between construction related semantic resources, providing a base for the development of a new generation of e-services for the domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the alignment between business requirements and application (software) functionality, the SDBC approach considers three viewpoints complementing each other, namely statics, dynamics, and information. Next to that, the approach addresses systematically and separately business modeling and application design, applying the mentioned viewpoints to both of them. The approach also allows for an adequate extension of its ‘dynamic‘ business modeling, acknowledging the real-life complexity that includes communication and coordination issues, such as meanings, intentions, commitments, and obligations. Hence, in order to consider appropriately these (communication and coordination - related) issues as complementing its dynamic business modeling, SDBC applies at least two modeling techniques. The transformation between them nevertheless complicates the modeling process; furthermore, different techniques use different modeling formalisms whose reflection sometimes causes limitations. For this reason, we explore in the current paper the value which the modeling language ISDL (allowing for useful refinement of business process models) could bring to SDBC, particularly in the elaboration of dynamic (behavioral) business models with real-life aspects. We also explore how SDBC can benefit from ISDL-related methods assessing whether a realized refinement conforms to the original process model. The results reported in this work are usefully supported by an illustrative example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a contact-less Human Computer Interaction (HCI) system that aims to provide paraplegics the opportunity to use computers without the need for additional invasive hardware. The proposed system is a multi-modal system combining both visual and speech input. Visual input is provided through a standard web camera used for capturing face images showing the user of the computer. Image processing techniques are used for tracking head movements, making it possible to use head motion in order to interact with a computer. Speech input is used for activating commonly used tasks that are normally activated using the mouse or the keyboard. The performance of the proposed system was evaluated using a number of specially designed test applications. According to the quantitative results, it is possible to perform most HCI tasks with the same ease and accuracy as in the case that a touch pad of a portable computer is used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a set of components that support psychotherapy processes on mobile and office settings. One provides patients the required access to psychotherapy artefacts, enabling an adequate and tailored aid and motivation for fulfilment of common therapy tasks. Another offers therapists the ability to define and refine the artefacts, in order to present, help and react to the patient according to his/her specific needs and therapy progress. Two other components allow the analysis and annotation of the aforementioned artefacts. All these components run on a PDA base. Evaluation results validated some of the design choices, and indicate future directions and improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evaluation of user interfaces for vehicular telematics systems is a challenging task, since it is necessary to understand the effects of interaction on driving performances. To this aim, in 2005 we developed and presented a framework specifically conceived for the indoor evaluation of these systems. In this paper we present some significant improvements of that proposal. In particular, we describe a graphical analysis tool able to provide a clear and deep insight about driver behaviors using the high amount of data generated by the simulator. Moreover, we report on the evaluation analysis that has been performed to assess the effectiveness of the framework for measuring driving performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A complex Web service described with languages like BPEL4WS, consists of an executable process and its observable behaviour (called an abstract process) based on the messages exchanged with the client. The abstract process behaviour is non deterministic due to the internal choices during the service execution. Furthermore the specification often includes timing constraints which must be taken into account by the client. Thus given a service specification, we identify the synthesis of a client as a key issue for the development of Web services. To this end, we propose an approach based on (dense) timed automata to first describe the observable service behaviour and then to build correct interacting clients when possible. The present work extends a previous discrete time approach and overcomes its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an enrichment of classical computational ontologies with fuzzy logic to create fuzzy ontologies. It is a step towards managing vagueness and facing the nuances of natural languages in ontology-based applications. Our proposal is implemented in the KAON ontology editor, that allows to handle ontology concepts in a high-level environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present our ViskiMap systems, ENWiC (EduNuggets Wiki Crawler) and Annoki (Annotation wiki), for intelligent visualization of Wikis. In recent years, e-Learning has emerged as an appealing extension to traditional teaching. To some extent, the appeal of e-Learning derives from the great potential of information and knowledge sharing on the web, which has become a de-facto library to be used by students and instructors for educational purposes. Wiki's collaborative authoring nature makes it a very attractive tool to use for e-Learning purposes. Unfortunately, the web's text-based navigational structure becomes insufficient as the Wiki grows in size, and this backlash can hinder students from taking full advantage of the information available. The objective behind ViskiMap is to provide students with an intelligent interface for navigating Wikis and other similar large-scale websites. ViskiMap makes use of graphic organizers to visualize the relationships between content pages, so that students can easily get an understanding of the content elements and their relations, as they navigate through the Wiki pages. We describe ViskiMap's automated visualization process, and its user interfaces for students to view and navigate the Wiki in a meaningful manner, and for instructors to further enhance the visualization. We also discuss our usability study for evaluating the effectiveness of ENWiC as a Wiki Interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product classification schemes aim at semantic interoperability in B2B e-commerce by providing consensual definitions of product categories and recommending properties for describing product instances. Considerable industry work has been carried out on enhancing the size and thus coverage of these schemes. Horizontal classification schemes, however, often consist of more than 10,000 classes, several thousand properties, and an even greater number of class-property relations. The problem is that maintaining these schemes becomes more and more demanding in particular due to the number of definitions and interrelations. This paper proposes measures for coping with the problem of extensive and steadily growing property libraries. We view these schemes from a data modeling perspective and relate the proposed measures to the underlying conceptual data model of product classification schemes. It can be shown that these measures greatly influence both standards makers and standards adopters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we present our approach of combining open and sophisticated technologies in order to establish an integrated rich media environment for collaborative visualization processes. Aiming to support comprehensive visualization settings of spatially separated domain specialists, we deploy remote render farms for producing the visualization of complex datasets as video streams, separately for every collaboration partner. This makes our system capable also for low-end mobile devices, which only have to be able to render MEPG-4 compliant video streams. The cooperation support is provided by a full-featured CSCW system including a shared whiteboard based on the platform independent Eclipse framework. The visualization objects are embedded in the CSCW system's persistent object space and presented by the rich media view of the shared whiteboard. Starting with a basic scenario of collaborative visualization we will present the architecture of the combined visualization and CSCW systems and the design of the plug-in based shared whiteboard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of large software applications (like EAI solution) is oriented toward the interoperation of existing software components (like COTS and legacy systems). COTS-based systems are built in ad-hoc manner and it is not possible to reason on them no more it is possible to demonstrate if such systems satisfy properties and/or quality attributes. On the other hand, software architecture domain aims at providing formal languages for the description of software systems allowing checking properties (formal analysis) and to reason about software architecture models. The paper proposes an approach that consists in formalizing, deploying and evolving Service-based EAI architectures. For that purpose, the ArchWare environment and engineering languages (especially the ArchWare formal ADL, based on the π-calculus) and accompanied tools are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent advent of the Semantic Web has given rise to the need for efficient and sound methods that would provide reasoning support over the knowledge scattered on the Internet. Description Logics and DL-based infer-ence engines in particular play a significant role towards this goal, as they seem to have overlapping expressivity with the Semantic Web de facto language, OWL. In this paper we argue that DLs currently constitute one of the most tempting available formalisms to support reasoning with OWL. Further, we present and survey a number of DL based systems that could be used for this task. Around one of them (Racer) we build our Knowledge Discovery Interface, a web application that can be used to pose intelligent queries to Semantic Web documents in an intuitive manner. As a proof of concept, we then apply the KDI on the CIDOC-CRM reference ontology and discuss our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed networks of independent companies (networked organisations) are currently of high interest. Configuration of a networked organisation is a strategic task that requires intelligent decision support and integration of various tasks constituting the configuration problem. Achieving efficient integration of tasks is possible when it is done taking into account semantics. The paper proposes an approach to this problem based on ontology-driven knowledge sharing. The knowledge in the approach is presented using formalism of object-oriented constraint networks. Application of the developed approach is demonstrated at two levels: (a) at the level of information integration within one company and (b) at the level of information integration across a networked organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an approach to increase the value gained from enterprise modeling activities in an organization. The main objective of the approach is to facilitate communication and coordination of modeling initiatives between stakeholders and within and across projects. The approach as a normative process model is presented and discussed in the context of case projects and activities, and we conclude that although work remains both on sophistication of the approach and on validation of its general applicability and value, our results show that it addresses recognized challenges in a useful way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consideration of Product information or Knowledge management, product traceability or genealogy, and product life cycle management implies new strategies and approaches to manage flows of information that relate to flows of material managed in shop floor level. Moreover, throughout product lifecycle coordination needs to be established between reality in the physical world (physical view) and the virtual world handled by manufacturing in-formation systems (informational view). This paper presents a product oriented modelling and a product oriented interoperability approach based on the use of the "Holon" modelling concept as a means for the synchronisation of both physical view and informational views. The Zachman framework is afterwards used as a guideline to establish product oriented interoperability between enterprise systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agile software development methods mainly aim at increasing software quality by fostering customer collaboration and performing exhaustive testing. The introduction of Extreme Programming (XP) - the most common agile software development method - into an organization is accompanied with conceptual and organizational changes. These changes range from daily-life changes (e.g., sitting together and maintaining an informative project environment) and continue with changes on the management level (e.g., meeting and listening to the customer during the whole process and the concept of the whole team which means that all role holders are part of the team). This paper examines the process of transition to an agile development process in a large-scale software project in the Israeli Air Force as it is perceived from the system analysis and design perspective. Specifically, the project specifications of the agile team are compared with those of a team who continues working according to the previous heavyweight method during the first half year of transition. Size and complexity measures are used as the basis of the comparison. In addition to the inspection of the specifications, the change in the role of the system analysts, as the system analysts conceive of it, is examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software development is a cooperative activity, since it implies many actors. We focus on CSCW integrated global environments. Many studies have already shown, for a long time, that a ‘good‘ cooperative environment should be able to take into account the users' emergent needs, and should be adaptable. Of course, such properties should also be found in environments supporting software development. However, our study of some existing platforms points out their lacks in terms of tailorability and cooperative support. Eclipse is one of these broadly used platforms. But even if it presents some shortcomings, its underlying framework offers some features particularly interesting for our purpose. Upon results previously obtained in the CSCW field, we propose to extend the Eclipse platform, in order to offer a new support for software development by creating a cooperative context for the activities supported in Eclipse by each integrated plug-in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a methodology and a model-based approach for supporting the requirements elicitation and validation work in the ATHENA project. Numerous interoperability requirements have been gathered by four industrial partners and these requirements are validated against interoperability issues. The process of obtaining requirements from industrial users and developing solutions for them involves several communities such as the users, stakeholders and developers. A model-based methodology and approach are proposed to support the analysis of the requirements and for incorporating the different perspectives and views that are desired by everyone. An example from the telecommunications sector is used to illustrate the methodology and a matrix-based validation approach is supported using a model developed in the Metis modelling environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structuring enterprise information and supporting knowledge management is a growing application field for enterprise ontologies. Research work presented in this paper focuses on construction of enterprise ontologies. In an experiment, two methods were used in parallel when developing an ontology for a company in automotive supplier industries. One method is based on automatic ontology construction, the other method is a manual approach based on cookbook-like instructions. The paper compares and evaluates the methods and their results. For ontology evaluation, selected approaches were combined including both evaluation by ontology engineers and evaluation by domain experts. The main conclusion is that the compared methods have different strengths and an integration of both developed ontologies and used methods should be investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]