Are there any example ontologies where the same word has different meaning in different contexts?
For example, when building an ontology for a large company, it is not uncommon for different departments and systems to have a different definition and understanding of common words like "customer", "account", etc.
Is there a generally accepted way to model this in Protege that preserves the original words in their context, while also introducing a layer of disambiguating words for enterprise use?
This is a problem we encounter often in the biological community. I.e., the concept Eye is very dependent on the context, i.e. human eye vs fish vs spider eye etc. You can see a search for eye on the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) and the results it return for eye from different ontologies. Disclosure: I am responsible for this tool.
I explain in this StackOverflow question the reason for using "surrogate keys".
Assign a context specific label and definition to your concept. You can use rdfs:label for label and rdfs:comment or skos:definition for definition.
You may find that you need alternatives for you concept. I.e. may be you refer to customers also as members. In this case you can use skos:altlabel to provide alternative names for your concept and skos:preflabel to define a preferred label.
So how does this work? For user interfaces you make use of rdfs:label/skos:preflabel and rdfs:comment/skos:definition for display purposes. From a data integration perspective you use the IRI.
