Ontology for semantic description of enterprise architectures

Abstract

The level of complexity involved in real world enterprise systems development is increasing nowadays above the usual tolerance thresholds with the proliferation of open Cloud API's. These come on top of the usual spaghetti effect of inter-dependencies generated by on-premises components and applications. Within this landscape the Enterprise Architecture (EA) approach may provide the answer to manage the complexity. However, EA is itself a complex process having to accommodate and inter-link multiple conceptual models, languages, people and disciplines. In this paper we develop a methodology to transform EA descriptions made in plain natural language into machine readable EA models using Semantic Web technologies. We do this first by choosing an EA framework, then developing the ontology for this framework and finally showing the usage of semantic annotations in transforming HTML pages into well defined machine-readable EA content. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.