Using Ontologies for Enterprise Architecture Analysis

Abstract

Enterprise architecture aligns business and information technology through the management of different elements and domains. An architecture description encompasses a wide and heterogeneous spectrum of areas, such as business processes, metrics, application components, people and technological infrastructure. Views express the elements and relationships of one or more domains from the perspective of specific system concerns relevant to one or more of its stakeholders. As a result, each view needs to be expressed in the description language that best suits its concerns. However, enterprise architecture languages tend to advocate a rigid "one-model fits all" approach where an all-encompassing description language describes several architectural domains. This approach hinders extensibility and adds complexity to the overall description language. On the other hand, integrating multiple models raises several challenges at the level of model coherence, consistency and trace ability. Moreover, EA models should be computable so that the effort involved in their analysis is manageable. This work advocates the employment of ontologies and associated techniques in EA for contributing to the solving of the aforementioned issues. Thus, a proposal is made comprising an extensible architecture that consists of a core domain-independent ontology that can be extended through the integration of domain-specific ontologies focusing on specific concerns. The proposal is demonstrated through a real-world evaluation scenario involving the analysis of the models according to the requirements of the scenario stakeholders.