Concern and business rule-oriented approach to construction of domain ontologies

A shared ontology is an essential condition for obtaining the stakeholders' agreement as well as for the interoperability of the applications which stakeholders use or are interested in. The paper presents an approach based on a concern and business rule-oriented analysis aimed at partitioning the information system domain in stakeholder-oriented subdomains. A stakeholder's concern depends on his or her interests or preoccupations originating from real world problems. The interests, preoccupations, and concerns depend on the stakeholders' beliefs and knowledge. The concepts in the mental representation of the stakeholders' beliefs and knowledge populate the universe of discourse and make up their vocabulary. The formal description of the intended meaning of this vocabulary forms a domain ontology. The paper exemplifies this approach considering the case of the registration of a new trading company using the services provided by the public administration institutions.