ONION 2006-10-09 Data The ONION (ONtologies In ONtology) is an open source semantic reference tool for the business of information technology which uses many terms that have novel or dual meanings. ONION is structured as a Community of Practice (COP) ontology that has multiple, domain specific, layers. The content of each layer is scoped by the set of IT topics that are relevant to a particular Community of Interest (COI) or Community of Action (COA). The foundational layers of the ONION are aligned with the public specifications of: IT Service Management Best Practice (e.g. ISO 20000, ITIL); IT Control Frameworks (e.g. ISACA COBIT); Information Security (e.g. ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 17799); IT Auditor Control Objectives (e.g. COSO); and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA, e.g. OASIS Business Centric Methodology, BCM). Acknowledging that ontologies are excellent classification schemas, the ONION core uses explicit links to controlled vocabularies as they become publicly available: IT Infrastructure (classes, properties, methods, values) e.g. Common Information Model; and Open Source Components (XML elements, attributes) e.g. ET.gov Development and Integration Service Interface and Integration Interface Service Discovery ONION Component Framework Data Interchange Data Exchange Resource Description Framework (RDF) Service Interface and Integration Interoperability Data Format / Classification eXtensible Markup Language (XML) http://www.CHECKMi.com Carl Mattocks