This paper presents an approach for building corporate knowledge,defined as the total knowledge acquired by an enterprise in its business dealings, through integration of its existing ontologies. We propose to represent corporate knowledge as the final merged ontology, defined under our formalism, in which a canon, or common ontology, is used as the standard under which all other ontologies are aligned. The canon is also enriched with knowledge gained during each ontology merging exercise. Our method ensures that all resulting ontologies are semantically consistent, compact and complete, as well as mathematically sound, so that formal reasoning could be conducted.
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