dea-ontology

Canonical grounding repository for Enterprise Ontology (EO) in the OpenDEA federation. Status: proposed pillar — see change-requests/CR-EO-01.md.

This repository grounds how an enterprise authors, governs, and consumes formal ontologies — upper-ontology conventions, ontology-engineering practice, ontology lifecycle, and sector-specific Enterprise Ontologies (e.g. Enterprise Business Ontology, Enterprise Technology Ontology). It is the discipline-of-formal-modelling sibling to technehub-labs/dea-semantic-architecture.

Scope split (with ESA):

• EO owns what is formally asserted (OWL/RDF classes, properties, axioms, reasoning).
• ESA owns how meaning is organised architecturally (patterns, topologies, governance rules).

EO's outputs cite ESA's patterns. ESA's outputs reference EO's axioms.

What lives here

• CHARTER.md — core meaning, scope, and non-scope of EO within OpenDEA. (Full prose lands in Phase 1.)
• TENETS.md — numbered axioms of the discipline, derived from the ECF 7×7 axiom grid. (Full prose lands in Phase 1.)
• axioms/ — three axiom files, each with derivation table to ECF. (Stub prose in Phase 1.)
• patterns/ — reusable Ontology Engineering patterns (upper-ontology conventions, profile declarations, axiomatisation depth, lifecycle). (Stub index; bodies in Phase 5.)
• sectors/ — sector-, industry-, and sub-sector-specific Enterprise Ontologies. (Index only in Phase 1; first pair — telecom operator + cloud service provider — in Phase 2–3; fintech + healthcare via dea-catalog-ontologies promotion in Phase 4.)
• BUILD-A-SPECIALIZED-ONTOLOGY.md — playbook for authoring a new sector Enterprise Ontology. (Outline in Phase 0; full prose in Phase 5.)
• change-requests/ — CRs that shape this repo. CR-EO-01 is the umbrella.
• GOVERNANCE.md — contribution rules, CR template, version semantics, ontology-lifecycle policy. (Stub prose in Phase 5.)

Relationship to OpenDEA

EO is one of two conceptual pillars introduced by CR-EO-01 (the other being ESA). Both sit between the OpenDEAM root (technehub-labs/dea-architecture-framework) and the conceptual layer (technehub-labs/dea-concepts-model), instantiating specific dimensions of the architecture:

OpenDEAM (root authority)
   │
   ├── ECF (dea-metaframework) — 7×7 axiom grid
   ├── ESA (dea-semantic-architecture) ← semantic dimension
   ├── EO (this repo) ← ontological dimension
   │
   ├── Concepts Model (dea-concepts-model, CR-CM-001)
   │       │
   │   Metamodel (dea-metamodel, CR-8; 1.0.0)
   │       │
   │   Catalog repos (dea-catalog-*) — L1 typed content
   │       │
   │   └── dea-catalog-ontologies ← Phase 4 promotion target (EO umbrella)
   │
   └── Assessment-Models/assessment-registry (CR-AR-01 scope extension)

Status

This repository is a proposal — it ships a scaffold + the spec doc, but the substantive content (CHARTER prose, TENETS, axioms, ontology patterns, sector content) lands in subsequent phases per change-requests/CR-EO-01.md.

Visibility: private at land; promoted to public after Phase 1 ships.

How to contribute

1. Read the umbrella CR: change-requests/CR-EO-01.md.
2. Read the charter (Phase 1+): CHARTER.md.
3. Propose new sector content via a sector-content CR (e.g. CR-EO-02 for telecom operator).
4. Phase plan lives in the umbrella CR; sectors land in pairs with ESA.

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Established under CR-EO-01 — Enterprise Ontology. Predecessor (promotion target, Phase 4): technehub-labs/dea-catalog-ontologies.