As will become clear later, we consider an enterprise to be a system, the activities of which have effect in the world that corresponds with it. Other words for this notion of world are “domain” and “Universe of Discourse”. because these other words are mostly not well-defined, we will exclusively use the word “world”, in order to avoid any confusion. The notion of world is a very general one: there is a world of traveling by airplane, there is a world of educating students at a university, there is a world of repairing and maintaining cars, and so on. A state of such a world can simply be conceived as a set of elementary facts, such as the fact that a particular person or car or insurance policy exists, or that a particular person owns a particular car, and that a particular insurance policy is for a particular car. Factual knowledge contrasts with procedural knowledge or know-how. In this chapter, we will elaborate the notion of factual knowledge, by which we mean the knowledge about the states and the state transitions of a world; this will ultimately lead to a precise definition of the ontology of a world.
