Ontology Transformation of Enterprise Architecture Models
Enterprise architecture supports the analysis and design of business-oriented systems through the creation of complementary perspectives from multiple viewpoints over the business, information systems and technological infrastructure, enabling communicati
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Information Systems Group, INESC-ID, Rua Alves Redol 9, 1000-029 Lisboa, Portugal. 2 Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon, Avenida Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal {marzieh.bakhshandeh,andre.coutinho,artur.caetano, jlb}@ist.utl.pt
Abstract. Enterprise architecture supports the analysis and design of businessoriented systems through the creation of complementary perspectives from multiple viewpoints over the business, information systems and technological infrastructure, enabling communication between stakeholders. However, enterprise architecture modelling languages lack representation schemas that support the computable assessment of its models. This paper applies model transformation to address this issue. The proposed approach translates models specified using ArchiMate into OWL. The resulting ontological representation is therefore computable, allowing for the analysis of the consistency and completeness of the enterprise architecture models. The applicability of the approach is shown through a case study. Keywords: enterprise architecture, model transformation, ontology, ArchiMate, OWL.
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Introduction
Enterprise architecture is defined by Lankhorst as [1] “a coherent whole of principles, methods, and models that are used in the design and realisation of an enterprise’s organisational structure, business processes, information systems, and infrastructure”. Enterprise architecture languages are usually specified without formal semantics or representation schemas that facilitate analysing its models. For instance, TOGAF is specified using a combination of textual descriptions and object-oriented models [2] and the BPMN metamodel [3] lacks a formal semantics that hinders checking the correctness of models [4]. The same issue occurs with the object-oriented metamodel of the ArchiMate language [5]. ArchiMate lacks a formal representation schema that could help to facilitate the analysing of its models. There has been a growing interest in Ontology Engineering during the last decade [6]. The most widely used definition characterizes ontologies as “formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization” [7]. Ontologies are becoming more important, by their role on the so called Semantic Web [8] [9] [10]. In different fields such as software engineering [11] [12] [13]. The use of ontologies and associated L.M. Camarinha-Matos et al. (Eds.): DoCEIS 2014, IFIP AICT 423, pp. 55–62, 2014. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014
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techniques in EA is increasing, with proposals of EA based on ontologies for improving the models and their semantics, as witnessed in [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19]. In the past few years a number of different approaches for evaluating EA models have been described. In [20], and [21], the authors have implemented a tool for analysing EA models, which guides the creation of enterprise information system scenarios in the form of enterprise architecture models and generates quantitative assessments of the scenari
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