an Ontology of Information Systems

An offshoot of research on developing methods typical business professionals can use to analyze systems for themselves, Sysperanto is being developed as an ontology codifying concepts and knowledge useful in describing and analyzing systems in organizations. Sysperanto’s architecture is organized around the nine elements of the work system framework and the observation that information systems, projects, supply chains, ecommerce, and other important types of systems can be modeled as special cases of work systems. These supertype-subtype relationships provide an opportunity to organize relevant concepts economically based on the “partial inheritance conjecture, ” whereby most, but not all, elements, properties, and propositions for a specific work system type are inherited by more specialized work system types. This paper explains why Sysperanto or other ontologies with similar purposes require the use of partial inheritance rather than strict hierarchy