Data, ontologies and decision making :An inter-disciplinary case study

Several studies have highlighted the need for information governance in organisations and the importance of quality data in decision making. Especially when considering the increasing need for collaboration, datasharing, and interoperability. Organisations are not immune to importance of information governance and given the recent spate of information- related disasters and accidents, information risk management has become all the more important and its link to corporate governance explicitly noted and mapped. Data driven organisations typically lack the structure to associate ontologies tagged with data and are unable to offer the rich semantics that sometimes can enrich a decision maker's worldview. Data documents need not necessarily capture relationships and ontologically there are unable to offer the rich semantics that the data can sometimes show. The value of data is enriched by the associated semantics and modern enterprise systems are inadequate in their capacity to capture this rich source of knowledge and its representation. This research borrows approaches from urban sustainability to understand domain ontologies and their implications in system design and subsequent improvement in the value of organisational information. It uses case studies to highlight ontology modelling and how such an approach can add value in an organisational context specifically in the domains of system design and information value chain.