Positioning and Formalizing the REA enterprise ontology

Gailly, Frederik [Université de Gand] Laurier, Wim [FUSL] Poels, Geert [Université de Gand]

Recent Resource, Event, Agent (REA) research has focused on defining and theoretically justifying the ontology’s contents. Here, we elaborate on more practical issues related to REA. First, we clas- sify REA and its applications using ontology classification schemes and application frameworks. This analysis clarifies REA’s application poten- tial but also reveals weaknesses that may impede its operationalization. Next, we propose a new REA ontology specification that uses a Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile for graphically representing ontolo- gies. This new specification is more complete and precise than previously available specifications, without compromising understandability. It can easily be transformed into a machine-readable representation for auto- matic processing, which is a prerequisite for the successful application of REA in business modeling, software engineering, knowledge represen- tation, and interoperability creation. The paper ends with a proof of concept application in which a formal Ontology Web Language (OWL) specification of REA is fed into the Prot ́eg ́e knowledge representation tool and subsequently used for the development of an enterprise schema.