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Using Ontologies to Integrate Multiple Enterprise Architecture Domains

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Business Information Systems Workshops (BIS 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 160))

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Abstract

A goal of enterprise architecture is to align the business with the underlying support systems. An enterprise architecture description encompasses an heterogeneous spectrum of domains, such as business processes, application components, metrics, people and technological infrastructure. Architectural views express the domain elements and their relationships from the perspective of the system stakeholders. As a result, a view needs to be expressed using a domain language that addresses the specific concerns of its stakeholders. However, enterprise architecture description languages are often based on generic or broad meta-models that cross-cut distinct architectural domains. But describing each domain through a specialized language and then integrating it with the other domains raises challenges at the level of traceability and consistency. This paper proposes using ontologies to specify different enterprise architecture domains and to integrate and analyse these models. This goal is realized through a domain-independent language that is extended by domain-specific languages, each focussing on a set of specific domain concerns. The approach contributes to the alignment of the different domains while ensuring traceability between then concepts. The proposal is demonstrated through an evaluation scenario that uses ArchiMate as the domain-independent language extended with a set of domain-specific languages. The demonstration shows that the architecture domains can be integrated and analysed through the use of ontologies.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001, Lisboa, Portugal

    Gonçalo Antunes, Artur Caetano, Marzieh Bakhshandeh & José Borbinha

  2. Information Systems Group, INESC-ID, Rua Alves Redol 9, 1000-029, Lisboa, Portugal

    Artur Caetano & José Borbinha

  3. SBA Research, Favoritenstraße 16, 1040, Wien, Austria

    Rudolf Mayer

Authors
  1. Gonçalo Antunes
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  2. Artur Caetano
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  3. Marzieh Bakhshandeh
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  4. Rudolf Mayer
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  5. José Borbinha
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, Poznań University of Economics, Poznań, Poland

    Witold Abramowicz

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Antunes, G., Caetano, A., Bakhshandeh, M., Mayer, R., Borbinha, J. (2013). Using Ontologies to Integrate Multiple Enterprise Architecture Domains. In: Abramowicz, W. (eds) Business Information Systems Workshops. BIS 2013. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 160. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41687-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41687-3_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41686-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41687-3

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