Meta-model Patterns for Expressing Relationships Between Organization Model Concepts and Software Implementation Concepts

The abstraction gap between organization models and models of software artifacts is of fundamental ontological nature, and bridging this gap cannot be achieved with solutions located either on the technological abstraction level or on the conceptual level separately. The work presented in this article describes a meta-model based approach to explicate design decisions on how to map conceptual organizational model constructs to software implementation specifications, from which software for supporting an organization’s work can subsequently be developed or generated. With the described meta-model patterns, one methodical component of a development method is made available to systematically guide the development of enterprise software systems, based on knowledge given in organization models.