The paper is devoted to the conceptual formalization of the goals, objectives and criteria for managing the digital transformation of mining enterprises. The main idea is to define digital transformation as a process of minimizing or completely excluding human participation from the implementation of production processes in order to build an autonomously functioning cyber-physical industrial system. In order to determine the ways of building and functioning mechanisms of such systems, the necessity of forming an enterprise architecture model has been established, both ensuring the completeness and consistency of the knowledge embedded in it, and providing an instrumental numerical basis for self-organization and self-regulation of the system. The irrelevance of applying existing standards and frameworks for building architecture models is substantiated. Approaches to the construction of an ontological model and ways of its application in the management task of the digital transformation of mining enterprises are proposed. Under the results of the work, a basic ontological model of the mining enterprise architecture was formed based on the OWL descriptive logic language in the Protégé environment, applicable to geospatial natural and technical industrial systems with an open type of production environments. The resulting model was tested using the HermiT logical inference mechanism, confirmed its coherence and consistency, which indicates the potential correctness of the initial hypotheses of the study and the possibility of further research into the formation of a methodology for the digital transformation of mining enterprises.