Chris is currently the Chief Ontologist for BORO Solutions and a Senior Research Fellow at University of Westminster. His expertise is in the pragmatic development of domain models (ontologies) for information systems and enterprise architectures as well as the development of foundational ontologies. He is the lead developer of one of the earliest foundational ontologies – BORO (Business Objects Reference Ontology: a four-dimensional, extensional ontology) – and the associated information re-engineering methodology for mining domain ontologies from existing information artefacts – bCLEARer.

Chris’s led the KPMG Consulting team that initially established BORO and bCLEARer as part of a legacy modernisation project in the finance sector that started in 1987. Chris described their development in that and subsequent projects in the book Business Objects: Re-engineering for re-use (1996), one of the first books to describe business information re-engineering using business objects and foundational ontologies.

Chris and his team’s work continues to be focused on the development and implementation of domain and foundational ontologies in enterprises and using this to evolve BORO and bCLEARer. This work has been in a variety of sectors including finance, defence and energy. More recently, the team have working on the UK’s National Digital Twin’s top-level ontology. As well as being used in enterprises, BORO has been used as a basis for many standards, including ISO15926, IDEAS, DODAF2, MODEM and IES4.

Chris regularly reports on his work in conferences and papers, a selection of which are included below. Two significant themes that emerge from these are firstly the way the bCLEARer process of mining ontologies enables high quality semantic interoperability and secondly how it gives rise to paradigm shifting models – examples of the latter are described in the papers on accounting (2018, 2003), agentology/epistemology (2018, 2005), constructionalism (2017, 2016) and nomenclature (2019).