Sharing rich business information sharing requires interoperability among various communities and their independently developed information assets. Due to a combination of evolving technologies and constant change in the political and economic landscape, capabilities for rapid deployment and evolution of systems are essential. Moreover, organizations are becoming increasingly interdependent and therefore the task of integrating and maintaining the systems that support them is both increasingly important and more difficult to accomplish. A sound metadata architecture and management strategy is key to achieving this goal.

For any person, agent or application to actively participate in a conversation, they must have a common understanding of the topic (or domain) and the concepts, rules, and terminology used by all participants. If collaboration is defined as "working with others to accomplish a common goal," then clearly the ability to do so is severely limited if there is not a common understanding of the domain, language, and rules used to describe it. In the same vein, when we consider what it means to integrate applications, to enable interoperability among software components, or more importantly for people to collaborate in a distributed environment, having a common understanding of the relevant concepts and terms, of how they relate to one another, and of the rules that define interaction among them is critical. These issues apply equally to cross-organizational business partnerships such as product development, outsourcing relationships, and other collaborative endeavors that leverage Internet technologies to streamline business processes.

Through a UML-based ontology modeling environment that supports frame-based knowledge representation, Sandpiper's Visual Ontology Modeler™ (VOM) enables construction of component-based ontologies that capture and represent finely granulated knowledge in an unambiguous way, so that this information can be shared and acted on by diverse groups of people and systems linked together by a network. Concepts, resources and processes can be described in multiple ways, depending on point of view, organizational heritage, or role of the individual describing them.

The VOM, an add-in to IBM Rational Rose®, enables modeling of domain, interface, process, and user ontologies, and provides support for web services integration through ontologies of the latest versions of OWL-S and the Semantic Web Services Language (SWSL). Interoperability with other enterprise software development environments and knowledge representation systems is provided through import/exxport capabilities. The Visual Ontology Modeler v1.5 supports import/export of XMI® (XML Metadata Interchange, the OMG standard for representing and exchanging XML between modeling tools) with an XMI-based integration to Adaptive's Foundation for enterprise knowledge exchange. VOM v1.5 also supports inport/export of RDFS/OWL and DAML+OIL. The knowledge bases generated out of the modeling environment form the basis for terminology resolution through metadata transformation services, ontology brokering and other intelligent agent-based applications.

Sandpiper Software is actively involved in standards activities relevant to ontology and knowledge representation, is a platform member of the OMG, and is an active member of the OMG Ontology PSIG. We are co-authoring the emerging Ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) standard, which the next generation VOM will support. That effort includes not only UML-based ontology authoring but provides first order logic support through the Simplified Common Logic (SCL) language, the successor to the Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF). The latest browsable version of the MOF 2.0-compliant SCL metamodel* is available. this