Analysis of federated enterprise architecture models

Abstract

Enterprise architecture models support decision-making as they help organizations to understand, communicate and analyse how business processes are performed, the goals they achieve, the information they use, as well as the applications that realize the business, and the supporting technological infrastructure. The integrated analysis of these models is not straightforward because it cross-cuts different domains that are described using heterogeneous concepts. This paper explores the application of ontologies to analyse enterprise architecture models. Ontologies represent knowledge that can be analysed using computational inference. The contributions of this paper are (1) the specification of multiple enterprise architecture models as ontological schemas, (2) the integration of ontological schemas, and (3) the analysis of the integrated models. The solution artefact consists of a federated model specified as a set of ontological schemas described in OWL-DL that integrates multiple enterprise models and assists their analysis using computational inference. The paper demonstrates the application of the federated model to the ArchiMate language as a means to assess the compliance of business requirements in a civil engineering scenario.