This paper presents experiences and conclusions from ontology engineering applied in the automotive suppliers domain. The work focuses on construction of enterprise ontologies to support structuring of enterprise information and knowledge management. Two methods for ontology construction, developed by previous research activities, were used in parallel when developing an ontology for a company in automotive supplier industries. One method is automatic and the other method is a manual approach. A conclusion was that the developed ontologies complemented each other well and therefore the decision was made to merge them for use in the project. The resulting ontology will now be used in several pilot applications.

During the last years, an increasing number of successful cases of using ontologies in industrial application scenarios have been reported, the majority of these cases stem from large enterprises. The intention of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of potentials and limits of ontology-based solutions in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). The focus is on identifying application areas for ontologies, which motivate the development of specialised ontology construction methods. The paper is based on results from a survey performed among 113 SME in Sweden, most of them from manufacturing industries. The results of the survey indicate a need from SME in three application areas: (1) management of product configuration and variability, (2) information search and retrieval, and (3) management of project documents.

The work presented is part of the research field information logistics, which investigates and develops concepts and technologies for improving information flow in organisations. The intention of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of information management problems in enterprises, and also improvement potentials of current information systems. The paper presents results of a study focusing on information overload in industrial enterprises, an area that previously has attracted little academic attention. Two areas are investigated: is information overload perceived as a problem in enterprises, and which application areas of enterprise information management should be prioritised for improvement activities? The survey was sent to 436 enterprises in the South of Sweden, most of them small and medium-sized enterprises, and received 164 valid responses. The sample used for the paper includes industrial enterprises from manufacturing, construction, and electronics industries, which accounts for approximately 80% of the responses.When analysing the data from the study, the paper follows the opinion of various scholars in the field that the complexity of an application case is an essential parameter to take into account when deciding on improvement potential. The more complex the application scenario is, the more likely is the usefulness of IT solutions for improving information flow. Research on complexity of projects proposes to define complexity as “consisting of many varied interrelated parts”, to distinguish between organisational and technological complexity, and to operationalise this in terms of “differentiation and interdependence”.One result of the study is a clear indication that information overload is perceived as a problem in industrial enterprises, which surfaces in problems such as finding the right information needed for a work task, and in the time needed to structure and store information. Furthermore, the results indicate two application areas that offer improvement potential: information management with focus on search and retrieval, and management of product information.

This paper presents experiences and conclusions from ontology engineering applied in the automotive suppliers domain. The work focuses on construction of enterprise ontologies to support structuring of enterprise information and knowledge management. Two methods for ontology construction, developed by previous research activities, were used in parallel when developing an ontology for a company in automotive supplier industries. One method is automatic and the other method is a manual approach. A conclusion was that the developed ontologies complemented each other well and therefore the decision was made to combine them for use in the project. The resulting ontology will now be used in the coming development of a pilot application.

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.

Due to the increasing implementation of agile and networked manufacturing, supply chain has entered a new phase, virtual supply chain. The phase is characterized by the integration of activities, operations, and functions carried out at different and geographically distributed supply chain stages. The paper proposes an approach to the configuration of a network of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) being integrated into a supply chain. The SME supply chain configuration is based on a shared domain ontology for supply chain management, offering the configuration task as a function of supply chain management. Principles of the development of the shared ontology and possible ways of matching between enterprise and domain ontologies are considered.

Ontologies are widely used as a technique for representation and reuse of knowledge. This paper summarizes experiences and results of a project within ontology development, with wood-related industry as application sector. One major aspect of the project was the selection of a suitable methodology for ontology development. In a literature study existing methodologies were analyzed with respect to their suitability for small-scale application contexts. As no existing methodology was fully adequate, an improved methodology was proposed. The main intention was to reduce development time and effort to meet the demands of small-scale application contexts. The improved methodology was applied and evaluated in the project, i.e. in the development of an ontology for wood-related industry. The main conclusion is that the methodology was adequate for the project, but some aspects could be elaborated and further investigated, such as reuse of already existing ontologies.