![](bg8.png)
6 CONCLUSIONS
Enterprise architecture management (EAM) aims to
optimize the alignment of business and IT. EA repos-
itories provide the required information base for deci-
sions on the information systems landscape, e.g. for
the development of a new application or new services.
EA frameworks such as TOGAF provide metamodels
as guideline for creating EA repositories. They define
which information is required and how it is linked.
This information, however, is only the core. A more
comprehensive information base can be provided by
integrating data from other EAM related information
sources. Connecting such already existing informa-
tion sources to the EA documentation avoids redun-
dant time and effort for its creation and maintenance.
However, integrating the data from these heteroge-
neous sources, each coming with its own data model
in a particular language, is a complex task.
We propose the use of semantic technologies for
integrating heterogeneous EAM relevant information
sources allowing for a Semantic Enterprise Archi-
tecture Management - SEAM. We defined a process
for building a SEAM repository that uses linked data
within an enterprise. Thereby, existing enterprise data
sets are exposed as ontologies and linked into the en-
terprise architecture. The EAM initiative can thus fo-
cus on modeling the interdependencies between busi-
ness, information systems and IT infrastructure. Mis-
matches between the documentation within the infor-
mation sources and reality can be easily discovered
and made transparent. We demonstrated the approach
by linking EA documentation (according to TOGAF),
business process models (in BPMN) and aspects of
services (according to the SOA ontology).
Depending on the existence of relevant data sets
the documentation task within an EAM initiative can
thus be reduced. Moreover, the resulting EA model
does not only statically document an EA, but is avail-
able in a formal and machine-readable representa-
tion formalism. Semantic technologies provides a
strong foundation for architecture analysis and con-
sistency checks as well as additional supporting tasks
for EAM. These will include visualization but also
novel applications of AI methodologies such as au-
tomated planning in the field of EA.
Future works include the refinement of the de-
fined mapping axioms and the inclusion of additional
data sources based on well-known standards. As the
chosen OWL language fragment is limited, complex
mapping operations such as aggregations or conver-
sions may be applied outside the repository within a
data provisioning step.
REFERENCES
Aier, S., Riege, C., and Winter, R. (2008). Unternehmen-
sarchitektur literatur
¨
uberblick und stand der praxis.
Wirtschaftsinformatik, 4(50):292–304.
Blowers, M. (2012). Hybrid enterprise architecture frame-
works are in the majority. http://ovum.com/2012/03/
22/hybrid-enterprise-architecture-frameworks-are-in-the-
the-majority/, accessed Feb. 12 2013.
Buschle, M., Grunow, S., Hauder, M., Matthes, F., and
Roth, S. (2012). Automating enterprise architecture
documenation using models of an enterprise service
bus. In AMCIS 2012 Proceedings, Seattle, Washing-
ton.
Essential Project (2012). Essential meta-model. http://
www.enterprise-architecture.org/component/content/
article/11-project-components/35-essential-meta-model,
accessed Feb. 12 2013.
Farwick, M., Agreiter, B., Breu, R., Ryll, S., Voges, K., and
Hanschke, I. (2011). Automation processes for enter-
prise architecture management. In Proceedings of the
2011 IEEE 15th International Enterprise Distributed
Object Computing Conference Workshops (EDOCW
’11), pages 340–349. IEEE Computer Society.
Gerber, A., Kotz, P., and van der Merwe, A. (2010).
Towards the formalisation of the TOGAF content
metamodel using ontologies. In Proceedings of the
12th International Conference on Enterprise Infor-
mation Systems (ICEIS 2010), pages 54–64, Funchal,
Madeira, Portugal.
Matthes, F. (2011). Enterprise Architecture Frameworks
Kompendium:
¨
Uber 50 Rahmenwerke f
¨
ur das IT-
Management. Springer, 1 edition.
Motik, B., Grau, B., Horrocks, I., Wu, Z., Fokoue, A., and
Lutz, C. (2012). OWL 2 web ontology language: Pro-
files. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-profiles/, accessed
Feb. 12 2013.
Natschlaeger, C. (2011). Towards a BPMN 2.0 ontol-
ogy. In Business Process Model and Notation, Lecture
Notes in Business Information Processing, page 115.
Springer.
Open Group (2009). TOGAF version 9. Technical report,
Van Haren Publishing.
Open Group (2010). Service-oriented architecture ontology.
ISBN 1931624887.
Stuckenschmidt, H. (2007). Partial matchmaking using ap-
proximate subsumption. In Proceedings of the 22nd
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 07), pages
1459–1464.
TopQuadrant (2012). Towards executable enterprise
models: Building semantic enterprise archi-
tecture solutions with topbraid suite. http://
www.topquadrant.com/docs/whitepapers/WP-Building
SemanticEASolutions-withTopBraid.pdf, accessed
Feb. 12 2013.
Zachman, J. (1987). A framework for information systems
architecture. IBM Systems Journal, 3(26).
SemanticEnterpriseArchitectureManagement
325