A Modular Ontology for the Enterprise Architecture Domain

Enterprise architecture supports the analysis, design and engineering of business-oriented systems through multiple views. Each view expresses the elements and relationships of a system from the perspective of specific system concerns relevant to one or more of its stakeholders. As a result, each view needs to expressed in the architecture description language that best suits its concerns. Therefore, an enterprise architecture may be described using a set of different languages. However, current enterprise architecture modelling languages display two issues in this setting. First, they lack mechanisms to integrate multiple architecture description languages. This issue hinders the specification of views using different languages. Second, enterprise architecture models lack quantitative analysis support. This paper describes an ontology-based approach in order to have a modular ontology for the enterprise architecture domain, to specify and integrate multiple architecture modelling languages and to analyse the resulting integrated models. The approach relies on transformations between an upper-domain ontology based on the ArchiMate language and on a set of domain-specific ontologies to deal with the specific architecture modelling languages. The resulting models are quantifiable in the sense they provide the means to assess the consistency of the enterprise architecture models and to analyse their structure. The applicability of the approach is shown through a case study and the correctness of the ontology is shown by a set of competency questions.

[1]  Stefano Spaccapietra,et al.  Modular Ontologies: Concepts, Theories and Techniques for Knowledge Modularization , 2009, Modular Ontologies.

[2]  John Klein,et al.  A Uniform Approach for System of Systems Architecture Evaluation , 2009 .

[3]  Barbara Fox,et al.  "Cooperative security": a model for the new enterprise , 1998, Proceedings Seventh IEEE International Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastucture for Collaborative Enterprises (WET ICE '98) (Cat. No.98TB100253).

[4]  Thomas R. Gruber,et al.  A translation approach to portable ontology specifications , 1993, Knowl. Acquis..

[5]  Giancarlo Guizzardi,et al.  Applying a foundational ontology to analyze means-end links in the i∗ framework , 2012, 2012 Sixth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS).

[6]  John A. Zachman,et al.  Enterprise Architecture: The Issue of the Century , 2001 .

[7]  Marc M. Lankhorst,et al.  Enterprise Architecture at Work - Modelling, Communication and Analysis, 2nd Edition , 2005, The Enterprise Engineering Series.

[8]  Mario Bunge,et al.  Epistemology & Methodology I: , 1983 .

[9]  Maria-Eugenia Iacob,et al.  ArchiMate 2.0 Specification: The Open Group , 2012 .

[10]  Erik Johansson,et al.  A Tool for Enterprise Architecture Analysis , 2007, 11th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC 2007).

[11]  John Domingue,et al.  A Core Ontology for Business Process Analysis , 2008, ESWC.

[12]  Frank S. de Boer,et al.  Enterprise Architecture Analysis with XML , 2005, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[13]  Giancarlo Guizzardi,et al.  Applying and extending a semantic foundation for role-related concepts in enterprise modelling , 2009, Enterp. Inf. Syst..

[14]  Giancarlo Guizzardi,et al.  An ontology-based semantic foundation for ARIS EPCs , 2010, SAC '10.

[15]  John Klein,et al.  A Workshop on Analysis and Evaluation of Enterprise Architectures , 2010 .

[16]  Markus Buschle,et al.  A Tool for Enterprise Architecture Analysis using the PRM formalism , 2010, CAiSE Forum.

[17]  Marta Indulska,et al.  A Reference Methodology for Conducting Ontological Analyses , 2004, ER.

[18]  M. Fox,et al.  Enterprise Modeling , 1998, AI Mag..

[19]  Maria-Eugenia Iacob,et al.  Quantitative Analysis of Enterprise Architectures , 2006 .

[20]  Giancarlo Guizzardi,et al.  Ontological foundations for structural conceptual models , 2005 .