Ontology-based enterprise architecture model analysis

Abstract

An enterprise architecture provides views on heterogeneous domains, such as business processes, people, business rules, application components, and technological infrastructure. These views are defined according to specific concerns and need to be expressed with an adequate description language. This entails integrating the description languages as a means to address the multiple concerns but raises the challenge of keeping the models coherent, consistent and traceable. This work describes an application of ontology engineering to enterprise architecture. The contribution is an extensible architecture description language that includes an upper ontology that can be integrated with multiple domain-specific ontologies, each focusing on different concerns. The resulting integrated models can be automatically analysed.