The infrastructure sub-system consists of communication support,
enterprise ontology and the enterprise taxonomy module.
Participants typically use two fundamental human skills to perform communication tasks. These are direct communication with
other participants and manipulation of shared knowledge. Direct
communications can occur either synchronously or asynchronously.
The communication support module provides direct asynchronous
communication functions such as a message box or
bulletin board.
The enterprise ontology module provides generic enterprise
concept templates using the form of the UML (unified modeling
language) class diagram, and stores instance knowledge of each
concept. If a specific domain concept is required in addition to
the generic concept template, participants can modify the class
diagram for their specific purpose. After completing the class diagram
that reflects specific enterprise needs, database tables for
storing instance knowledge are automatically created. When new
instance data such as a new product and/or a new customer are
created in an enterprise, the participant registers this data into
the ontology repository.