Development and maintenance of enterprise systems is becoming more difficult due to change drivers along multiple interconnected dimensions. It is advisable to model the enterprise first and analyze it for potential concerns. For modeling enterprises, ontologies have been considered apt and have been used in the past for the same, but application of ontologies for EA analysis based on concepts of enterprise and relations between them have been scarce. We present our ongoing work on analyzing enterprise models using EA-based ontological representation of enterprise. Our contributions are twofold: first, we show how an existing EA modeling language can be leveraged to create EA ontology and second, we show how two known EA analyses can be realized using this ontology. Initial results suggest that ontology representation facilitates basic EA analysis prototyping due to right mix of representation and inference functionalities and is extensible for more involved EA analyses.

1. 1MODELS’13 Tata Research Design and Development Center
Analyzing Enterprise Models Using Enterprise
Architecture-based Ontology
Sagar Sunkle, Vinay Kulkarni, and Suman
Roychoudhury

2. 2MODELS’13 Tata Research Design and Development Center
Motivation
 Multiple change drivers in enterprise context
Enterprise
BusinessChange Drivers
1. Cost reduction/revenue
increment
2. Mergers/acquisitions/divesti
tures
3. New regulations
4. Audit findings
Changes due to Business Drivers
1. Process changes
2. Product offerings
3. New functionality needs
4. New data needs
Technology Drivers
1. Vendor-driven upgrades
2. Technology consolidation
mandates
3. Mobile/cloud presence
Changes to Technology Drivers
1. Process changes
2. Product offerings
3. New functionality needs
4. New data needs

3. 3MODELS’13 Tata Research Design and Development Center
Motivation
 Holistic Enterprise Modeling- Model of enterprise that
makes sense of business, IT, and infrastructure entities
individually and from point of view of entire enterprise
 Enterprise Architecture Frameworks for holistic view but
…
o Document-based enterprise models
o Non-machine processable
 This is where ontology-based representation comes into picture

4. 4MODELS’13 Tata Research Design and Development Center
Way to go about it
 ArchiMate as the basis of enterprise architecture
ontology- good starting point for intended use-cases
 Generic metamodel of ArchiMate is based on subject-
verb-object nature of natural language sentences
 ArchiMate core concepts
o structure and behavior
o services and interfaces
o specialized across business, IT(application), and infrastructure
concepts in the ontology
o Business-IT and IT-Infrastructure alignment via services

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Using ArchiMate Metamodels
ArchiMateCoreMetamodel

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Using ArchiMate Metamodels
ArchiMateCoreMetamodel
EnterpriseArchitectureLayer-specific
Concepts

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Using ArchiMate Metamodels in EA Ontology

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Using ArchiMate Metamodels in EA Ontology

9. 9MODELS’13 Tata Research Design and Development Center
Modeling Enterprise Entities – ArchiSurance Case
Study

10. 10MODELS’13 Tata Research Design and Development Center
Ontology Tools
 Protégé Ontology Editor for Ontology Modeling
 Apache Jena for Ontology API
 Pellet Reasoner + SPARQL RDF Query Language for Rules

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Change Impact Analysis Of EA
 Change to any entity in any of business, application, infrastructure
dimensions leads to changes to entities related to it
 Based on Change impact analysis of enterprise architectures Frank
S. de Boer and Marcello M. Bonsangue and Luuk Groenewegen and
Andries Stam and S. Stevens and Leendert W. N. van der Torre

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Change Impact Analysis Of EA
 Meaning attributed to various structural and behavioral relations in
ArchiMate; each relation connects two concepts- what happens to
one of the concepts when the other is deleted or modified
 When B is modified/deleted, the concepts it is related to will also be
affected- this goes on till no more concepts can get affected

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Change Impact Analysis Of EA
 Easily translated into SPARQL

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An example from ArchiSurance Case Study

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Concept is deleted
May have to delete
May be dangling
No effect
An example from ArchiSurance Case Study

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Issues with Change Impact Analysis Ontology-
based Enterprise Models
 Meaning attributed to ArchiMate relations and implemented atop
ArchiMate-based ontology; not immediately usable when other EA
frameworks are used
 This change impact analysis is just change propagation without
considering deeper effects; for decision making, only provides a
rough overview of which entities may get affected and therefore
should be addressed
 Change impact analysis may be carried out with intentional modeling
where changes are possible alternatives and have cumulative effect
on goals
 Ontology representation enables prototyping of such variations on
change impact computation

17. 17MODELS’13 Tata Research Design and Development Center
Computing Landscape Maps
 Landscape map computation involves rule execution, for example,
‘Set of application components C, given business processes P and
business services S such that (1) C is usedBy P and (2) P realises S’
 Closer inspection of cross layer metamodels reveals that “Business
service” is not related to “application component” directly
 May be indirectly related via chain of relations between intermediate
concepts
 A composition operator for ArchiMate relations may be used to
establish single indirect relation to compute mutual dependence
 Based on
o Landscape Maps for Enterprise Architectures - Leendert W. N. van der Torre and
Marc M. Lankhorst and Hugo W. L. ter Doest and Jan T. P. Campschroer and
Farhad Arbab
o Composition of Relations in Enterprise Architecture Models - René van Buuren
and Henk Jonkers and Maria-Eugenia Iacob and Patrick Strating

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Computing Landscape Maps using SPARQL
Property Paths

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An Example
 FinancialApplication usedBy HomeNAwayPolicyAdministration realises
PolicyCreationService usedBy CheckAndSignContract == FinalcialApplication
usedBy CheckAndSignContract

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Summary
 Compared to previous approaches for enterprise ontology, this
approach is holistic with machine-processable and analyzable
enterprise models
 Similar method is applicable when EA ontology is based not on
ArchiMate but any other EA framework
 Further extensions with intentional goal modeling already underway
with real word merger of two wealth management banks

21. 21MODELS’13 Tata Research Design and Development Center
Thanks!! Any questions??
Please get in touch with me
sagar.sunkle@tcs.com