Identifying Business Components on the Basis of an Enterprise Ontology

Abstract

Companies are more and more focusing on their core competencies, outsourcing business tasks to their business partners. In order to support collabora-tion between business partners, adequate information systems need to be built automating inter-organizational business processes. The bases for such information systems are business components combining software artefacts from different ven-dors to applications which are individual to each customer. The crucial factors in identifying and building reusable, marketable and self-contained business compo-nents are the appropriateness and the quality of the underlying business domain models. This paper therefore introduces a process for the identification of business components based on an enterprise ontology, being a business domain model satis-fying well defined quality criteria.