Abstract
Enterprise architecture facilitates the alignment between different domains, such as business, applications and information technology. These domains must be described with description languages that best address the concerns of its stakeholders. However, current model-based enterprise architecture techniques are unable to integrate multiple descriptions languages either due to the lack of suitable extension mechanisms or because they lack the means to maintain the coherence, consistency and traceability between the representations of the multiple domains of the enterprise. On the other hand, enterprise architecture models are often designed and used for communication and not for automated analysis of its contents. Model analysis is a valuable tool for assessing the qualities of a model, such as conformance and completeness, and also for supporting decision making. This paper addresses these two issues found in model-based enterprise architecture: (1) the integration of domain description languages, and (2) the automated analysis of models. This proposal uses ontology engineering techniques to specify and integrate the different domains and reasoning and querying as a means to analyse the models. The utility of the proposal is shown through an evaluation scenario that involve the analysis of an enterprise architecture model that spans multiple domains.
Highlights
Enterprise architecture is defined by Lankhorst as "a coherent whole of principles, methods, and models that are used in the design and realization of an enterprise's organizational structure, business processes, information systems, and infrastructure", with a "focus on alleviating the infamous business-information technology alignment problem" [1]
The adopted technique is that of ontology mapping, due to the fact that a Domain-Specific Ontologies (DSOs) specializes some of the concepts present in the Upper Ontology (UO), but not all of them
Other more specialized maps can be created between the elements of the UO and DSO by using the ObjectProperties already provided by the ArchiMate ontology
Summary
Enterprise architecture is defined by Lankhorst as "a coherent whole of principles, methods, and models that are used in the design and realization of an enterprise's organizational structure, business processes, information systems, and infrastructure", with a "focus on alleviating the infamous business-information technology alignment problem" [1]. The main contribution of this article is proposing an architecture based on the use of ontologies that provides the following features: Representation of enterprise architecture models, providing information processing capabilities, namely computational inference and information querying, allowing for: o Enforcement of meta-model coherence, through the addition of axioms to the ontologies enforcing semantic rules implicitly defined in the model specifications. Ontological integration of the viewpoints of different stakeholders, offering improved extensibility and expressiveness of the Enterprise Architecture, through the management of the inclusion of new domain-specific meta-models in a standard way, with the aim capturing specific aspects of organisations. We describe an example that maps the sensor technology domain to ArchiMate in the context of a real-world scenario This demonstration shows that the application of ontologies to Enterprise Architecture modelling effectively assists consistently aligning and analysing different domains.
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