For an overview of this concept, I am going to reference an article written by Dave McComb called The Enterprise Ontology. It offers a good description of an Enterprise Ontology as well as some very good reasons as to why an organisation, and in this case a City or the City Administration, should build one. The article was written in 2006 and I will quote the first paragraph:
At the time of this writing, almost no enterprises in North America have a formal enterprise ontology. Yet we believe that within a few years this will become one of the foundational pieces to most information system work within major enterprises.
We are now in 2020 and the development of ontologies for organisations and specific domains has developed considerably. The article on Wikipedia covers several examples and there is also the GIST ontology developed by Dave McComb and SemanticArts. These and many others are now underpinning the information systems that exist within many organisations.
An organisation can take some time to design, model and build an enterprise ontology and the benefits will, if it is managed effectively, bring considerable change to people and value to the information created. An enterprise ontology provides the enterprise with a data model or indexing system to define meaning, classification and categorisation for all of its assets, systems and services. It can add a lot of value if complemented with Asset Management. It stands to reason that Smart Cities can benefit by developing a Smart City Ontology using some of the standards and examples in place today and using it with City Asset Management. The links below will take you to further references on this subject.
| Further References |
| Smart City Ontology, Classification |
Smart City Cyber Security 