An ontology-based Enterprise Architecture
Introduction
Today, enterprises make efforts to cope with dynamically changing business environment. Among the various efforts, enterprises pay attention to Enterprise Architecture (EA). The Enterprise Architecture refers to a comprehensive description of all of the key elements and relationships that make up an organization (Harmon, 2003). In other words, it is thought of the enterprise blueprint which systematizes constituent units of an enterprise, such as business processes, organizations, data, and information technologies. The Enterprise Architecture enables enterprise members to understand detailed structure and components of the enterprise and how they work together. Brown asserts six common values of the Enterprise Architecture as follows (Brown, 2004):
- (1)
Readily available documentation of the enterprise.
- (2)
Ability to unify and integrate the business processes across the enterprise.
- (3)
Ability to unify and integrate data across the enterprise and to link with external partners.
- (4)
Increased agility by lowering the complexity barrier.
- (5)
Reduced solution delivery time and development costs by maximizing reuse of enterprise model.
- (6)
Ability to create and maintain a common vision of the future shared by both the business and IT communities, driving continuous business/IT alignment.
Current Enterprise Architectures, however, lack semantics so that humans and systems cannot understand the Enterprise Architectures exactly and commonly. The lack of semantics causes problems in the point of the first and sixth Enterprise Architecture values above. If the Enterprise Architecture, namely, documentation of the enterprise as stated in the first value, cannot be understood exactly and commonly by enterprise members, machines, suppliers, customers, and others, the Enterprise Architecture cannot but lose the value. This causes communication problems between humans or between systems or between human and system. For example, although a process of an enterprise is defined systematically, if a process manager, a process operator and systems understand details of the process incorrectly and differently, the process cannot be executed correctly and effectively. The communication problems keep enterprises from implementing integration and collaborating with others, which is against the second and third value of the Enterprise Architecture. In order to solve these problems from the lack of semantics of the Enterprise Architecture, an ontology-based Enterprise Architecture is suggested in this paper.
An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization (Gruber, 1993). The ontology includes definitions of concepts and an indication of how concepts are inter-related which collectively impose a structure on the domain and constrain the possible interpretations of terms (Uschold, 1998). The ontology is used to improve communication between either humans or computers (Uschold & Jasper, 1999). In the concrete, the ontology is used to assist in communication between human agents, to achieve interoperability among computer systems, or to improve the process and/or quality of engineering software systems (Uschold & Jasper, 1999). Therefore, if the Enterprise Architecture is defined in the form of the ontology, the Enterprise Architecture can get the abilities of the ontology so that it can solve the above communication problems. Concretely, stakeholders of an enterprise can share exact and common understandings about the Enterprise Architecture and systems under Enterprise Architecture can achieve interoperability. This leads to support internal enterprise integration and external cooperation with other enterprises.
In this paper, the Enterprise Architecture is modeled with ontologies in three levels. In the first level, business terms are defined with ontologies. Business terms are important in the point of the Enterprise Architecture. The Enterprise Architecture, as an enterprise blueprint, must manage business terms used by stakeholders and systems of an enterprise, and, reversely, the Enterprise Architecture is described with these business terms. These business terms must be understood by humans and systems exactly and commonly. But, enterprises have communication problems caused by usage of implicit and different business terms, which hinders integration of an enterprise and collaboration among enterprises. To solve the communication problems, business terms of the Enterprise Architecture is defined with ontologies, and the Enterprise Architecture is also described with these common business terms. In the second level, ontologies are used in order to describe components of the Enterprise Architecture exactly and commonly. Existing Enterprise Architectures have defined their components with natural languages so that they can be misunderstood by humans and systems. This misunderstanding problem hinders integration of an enterprise and collaboration among enterprises. In the third level, relationships among components of the Enterprise Architecture are described based on ontologies for common understanding. Existing Enterprise Architectures have modeled relationships among components of the Enterprise Architecture, but consideration for common understanding of them is insufficient. For example, relationships among strategies consist of super-sub relationship, same relationship, opposite relationship, and others, but it is vague what the super-sub relationship is, which character the relationship has, and so on. Naturally, people can understand the relationship in their own way after they interpret the model and search for related documents written in natural languages. But the model is almost system-friendly and does not have semantics and it is annoying to search other documents.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides related works. In Section 3, Zachman Enterprise Architecture is introduced as a base Enterprise Architecture in this paper. The ontology-based Enterprise Architecture is suggested in Section 4. Finally, conclusions and future works are discussed in Section 5.
Section snippets
Related works
Zachman, 1987, FEA Program Management Office, 2007, US Department of Defense, 2007 are representative Enterprise Architectures. They, however, lack in consideration for common understanding of Enterprise Architectures. Although FEA-Reference Model Ontology (FEA-RMO) (Allemang, Hodgson, & Polikoff, 2005) is proposed in order to share meanings of FEA reference models, it is nothing but the model which describes FEA reference models with Web Ontology Language (OWL). It is only for FEA reference
Enterprise Architecture
In order to define Enterprise Architecture with ontologies, framework to define Enterprise Architecture is required. There are various Enterprise Architecture frameworks. Among them, the Zachman framework (Zachman, 1987; Zachman Institute for Framework Advancement) is selected as a base Enterprise Architecture framework to define the ontology-based Enterprise Architecture of this paper. The Zachman framework is created by John Zachman, and is valued as the beginning and standard Enterprise
Ontology-based Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Architectures are comprised of Enterprise Architecture components and relationships of them as shown in Fig. 5 simply. In this section, the ontology-based Enterprise Architecture for common understanding of Enterprise Architecture is suggested. The ontology-based Enterprise Architecture is modeled in three levels as shown in Fig. 6. The Enterprise Architecture ontology is composed of ontology for business terms, ontology for Enterprise Architecture components and ontology for
Conclusions
The Enterprise Architecture is a descriptive document which explains all about enterprise components systematically. Through the Enterprise Architecture, Enterprises can implement enterprise integration to cope with dynamically changing business environment. Existing Enterprise Architectures, however, lack of semantics for humans and systems to understand them exactly and commonly, which causes communication problems between humans or between systems or between human and system. These
Acknowledgement
This work is supported by Grant No. R01-2007-000-11040-0 from the Basic Research Program of the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation.
References (25)
- Allemang, D., Hodgson, R., & Polikoff, I. (2005). Federal Enterprise Architecture reference model ontologies: FEA-RMO...
- Bertolazzi, P., Krusisch, C., & Missikoff, M. (2001). An approach to the definition of a core enterprise ontology: CEO....
- Brown, T. (2004). The value of Enterprise Architecture, Zachman Institute for Framework Advancement (ZIFA), online...
- Enterprise Integration Laboratory. (2002). TOronto Virtual Enterprise (TOVE) project, online available at...
- FEA Program Management Office. (2007). FEA consolidated reference model version 2.3, online available at...
- FEA-PMO. (2006). Federal transition framework metamodel reference version 1.0, online available at...
- et al.
Declarative process modeling with business vocabulary and business rules
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
(2007) - Gruber, T. (1993). Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing. Technical Report...
Fact-oriented modeling: Past, present and future
- Harmon, P. (2003). Developing an Enterprise Architecture, Business process trends:...
A context-based enterprise ontology
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
WordNet: An on-line lexical database
International Journal of Lexicography
Cited by (88)
The value of and myths about enterprise architecture
2019, International Journal of Information ManagementBuilding a business domain meta-ontology for information pre-processing
2018, Information Processing LettersCitation Excerpt :In the enterprise domain, Lee et al. [16] propose the layered ontology representation model as a foundation for the product ontology architecture for collaborative enterprises. Also in order to solve some problems from the lack of semantics of the Enterprise Architecture, an ontology-based Enterprise Architecture has been suggested by Kang et al. [17], where the enterprise is modeled according to the Zachman Enterprise Architecture framework [18]. The authors have developed a meta-model in order to model relationships of Enterprise Architecture components.
The important role of system dynamics investigation on business model, industry and performance management
2024, International Journal of Productivity and Performance ManagementTowards a Knowledge Base of Terms on Enterprise Architecture Debt
2024, Lecture Notes in Business Information ProcessingA Systematic Approach to Generate TOGAF Artifacts Founded on Multiple Data Sources and Ontology
2023, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)Towards an Ontology to Enforce Enterprise Architecture Mining
2023, International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, ICEIS - Proceedings