A Modular Ontology for the Enterprise Architecture Domain

Abstract

Enterprise architecture supports the analysis, design and engineering of business-oriented systems through multiple views. Each view expresses the elements and relationships of a system from the perspective of specific system concerns relevant to one or more of its stakeholders. As a result, each view needs to expressed in the architecture description language that best suits its concerns. Therefore, an enterprise architecture may be described using a set of different languages. However, current enterprise architecture modelling languages display two issues in this setting. First, they lack mechanisms to integrate multiple architecture description languages. This issue hinders the specification of views using different languages. Second, enterprise architecture models lack quantitative analysis support. This paper describes an ontology-based approach in order to have a modular ontology for the enterprise architecture domain, to specify and integrate multiple architecture modelling languages and to analyse the resulting integrated models. The approach relies on transformations between an upper-domain ontology based on the ArchiMate language and on a set of domain-specific ontologies to deal with the specific architecture modelling languages. The resulting models are quantifiable in the sense they provide the means to assess the consistency of the enterprise architecture models and to analyse their structure. The applicability of the approach is shown through a case study and the correctness of the ontology is shown by a set of competency questions.