An Integrated View of Data: Application of Knowledge Modeling to Data Management

Data management has become an important challenge. Good data management requires an effective approach to collecting, storing, and accessing data across the enterprise. In this paper, a knowledge modeling approach to data management is introduced with an emphasis on data requirements analysis. A knowledge model can provide a high-level view of organizational data by specifying the structure and relationships of the knowledge contents used in business processes. The proposed knowledge modeling approach is business process oriented and decision oriented. The description of the knowledge contents in the model is based on ontological specification. The model is comprised of five elements: work product, work unit, producer, stage, and modeling language. The elements of the model and the modeling process are elaborated. The proposed modeling approach is applied to the vessel chartering process in a shipping company to demonstrate its application in real-world practices.