Gonçalo Antunes

Using Ontologies for Enterprise Architecture Integration and Analysis

Enterprise architecture facilitates the alignment between different domains, such as business, applications and information technology. These domains must be described with description languages that best address the concerns of its stakeholders. However, current model-based enterprise architecture techniques are unable to integrate multiple descriptions languages either due to the lack of suitable extension mechanisms or because they lack the means to maintain the coherence, consistency and traceability between the representations of the multiple domains of the enterprise. On the other hand, enterprise architecture models are often designed and used for communication and not for automated analysis of its contents. Model analysis is a valuable tool for assessing the qualities of a model, such as conformance and completeness, and also for supporting decision making. This paper addresses these two issues found in model-based enterprise architecture: (1) the integration of domain description languages, and (2) the automated analysis of models. This proposal uses ontology engineering techniques to specify and integrate the different domains and reasoning and querying as a means to analyse the models. The utility of the proposal is shown through an evaluation scenario that involve the analysis of an enterprise architecture model that spans multiple domains.

Using ontologies to capture the semantics of a (business) process for digital preservation

IT-supported business processes and computationally intensive science (called e-science) have become increasingly ubiquitous in the last decades. Along with this trend comes the need to make at least the most important of these processes available for the long term, to allow later analysis of their execution, or even a re-execution. As such, the preservation of scientific experiments and their results enables others to reproduce and verify the results as well as build on the result of earlier work. All but the simplest processes require to be described by a multitude of information objects, as well as their interconnections and relations, to be successfully preserved. To enable a semantic description of these objects in a structured manner, we developed a formal meta-model that can be utilised in the digital preservation of a process. The meta-model describes classes of elements and their relations, in the form of ontologies, with a core ontology describing the generic concepts, and extension mechanisms to map supplementary ontologies describing more specific aspects. In this paper, we present the overall architecture and individual ontologies, and motivate their usefulness via the application to use cases from different domains.

Preserving scientific processes from design to publications

Digital Preservation has so far focused mainly on digital objects that are static in their nature, such as text and multimedia documents. However, there is an increasing demand to extend the applications towards dynamic objects and whole processes, such as scientific workflows in the domain of E-Science. This calls for a revision and extension of current concepts, methods and practices. Important questions to address are e.g. what needs to be captured at ingest, how do the digital objects need to be described, which preservation actions are applicable and how can the preserved objects be evaluated. In this paper we present a conceptual model for capturing the required information and show how this can be linked to evaluating the re-invocation of a preserved process.

Manage Risks through the Enterprise Architecture

The goal of Risk Management activities is to define prevention and control mechanisms to address the risks attached to specify activities and valuable assets. Many Risk Management efforts operate in silos with narrowly focused, functionally driven, and disjointed activities. That fact leads to a fragmented view of risks, where each activity uses its own language, customs and metrics. The lack of interconnection and holistic view of risks limits an organization-wide perception of risks, where interdependent risks are not anticipated, controlled or managed. In order to address the Risk Management interoperability and standardization issues, this paper proposes an alignment between Risk Management, Governance and Enterprise Architecture activities, providing a systematic support to map and trace identified risks to enterprise artifacts modeled within the Enterprise Architecture, supporting the overall strategy of any organization. We discuss the main relationships between Risk Management and Enterprise Architecture and propose an architecture to integrate risks concerns into the overall organization environment.

Modeling digital preservation capabilities in enterprise architecture

The rising awareness of the challenges of preserving information over the long term has led to a wealth of initiatives developing economic models, methods, tools, systems, guidelines and standards for digital preservation. The challenge of digital preservation is to assure that information nowadays coded and stored in digital formats can be read and be used in an unforeseen future. This is an interdisciplinary problem combining organizational and technical challenges. However, to date there is no unified view on how to approach the problem from a holistic perspective and align organizational and technical issues in a systems engineering approach. Organizations that aim to add digital preservation to their abilities generally have difficulties to assess their existing systems and what capabilities and components they are missing in order to address the needs of trustworthy information longevity. In this paper we present an approach that enables us to accommodate the concerns of digital preservation in Enterprise Architecture practice. We discuss key elements of a generic reference architecture for digital preservation and a capability model based on established domain-specific reference models. Distilling these knowledge sources into a consistent and coherent view allows baseline assessment and incremental capability development in typical IT governance scenarios where an IT architecture already exists. We illustrate this with the assessment of a government agencys existing capabilities and systems against emerging digital preservation requirements.

A Modular Ontology for the Enterprise Architecture Domain

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.

Using Ontologies to Integrate Multiple Enterprise Architecture Domains

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.

Representation and analysis of enterprise models with semantic techniques: an application to ArchiMate, e3value and business model canvas

Enterprise models assist the governance and transformation of organizations through the specification, communication and analysis of strategy, goals, processes, information, along with the underlying application and technological infrastructure. Such models cross-cut different concerns and are often conceptualized using domain-specific modelling languages. This paper explores the application of graph-based semantic techniques to specify, integrate and analyse multiple, heterogeneous enterprise models. In particular, the proposal described in this paper (1) specifies enterprise models as ontological schemas, (2) uses transformation mapping functions to integrate the ontological schemas and (3) analyses the integrated schemas with graph querying and logical inference. The proposal is evaluated through a scenario that integrates three distinct enterprise modelling languages: the business model canvas, e3value, and the business layer of the ArchiMate language. The results show, on the one hand, that the graph-based approach is able to handle the specification, integration and analysis of enterprise models represented with different modelling languages and, on the other, that the integration challenge resides in defining appropriate mapping functions between the schemas.

Analysis of Federated Enterprise Architecture Models

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.

Virtual DL poster sessions in second life

In Second Life (SL), a popular general-purpose 3D virtual world, we are supporting the Digital Library community in a variety of ways, including through virtual poster sessions. This brings together the interests of those involved in JCDL 2009, IEEE-TCDL, and NSF-supported work in SL aimed to assist education, training, and dissemination in the digital preservation area.