Knowledge Management Tool for Integrated Decision-Making in Industry : Technology for ontology development aimed at integrated decision support systems in process industries

Nowadays companies have taken the task of develop better management information systems in order to help the decision makers to exploit data and models, with the final objective of discussing and improving decision-making. Decision support systems must be improved in order to deal with the large amount of available data and the heterogeneity of existing modeling approaches along the enterprise structure. This book proposes the application of ontologies as a decision support tool, since they are increasingly seen as a key semantic technology for addressing heterogeneities and for enabling data mining by semantics-driven knowledge processing. As a decision support tool, it must be capable of standing as a robust model which interacts among the different decision hierarchical levels, providing a unified framework for data and information. The work presented represents a step forward toward integration among the enterprise hierarchical levels, standardization in processes and enterprises, as well as improved procedures for decision-making. The aforementioned achievements are boosted by the application of semantic models, which are currently increasingly used.