The business knowledge for customer relationship management: an ontological perspective

This paper presents some results of an ongoing ontological analysis of the CRM field. In particular, it describes a fragment of O-CREAM, an ontology for CRM based on DOLCE and on other three DOLCE-based modules, i.e. DnS (for the representation of roles and for handling reification), OIO (for modeling information objects, the key concept for representing business knowledge), and OoP (whose notions are used to express the derivation of new business knowledge). Since the business knowledge plays a major role within CRM activities, a significant fragment of O-CREAM is devoted to the formal characterization of notions related to business knowledge; such a fragment is the focus of this paper.