Toward an ontology for EA modeling and EA model quality

Abstract

Models have long since been used, in different shapes and forms, to understand, communicate about, and (re)shape, the world around us; including many different social, economic, biological, chemical, physical, and digital aspects. This is also the case in the context of enterprise architecture (EA), where we see a wide range of models in many different shapes and forms being used as well. Researchers in EA modeling usually introduce their own lexicon, and perspective of what a model actually is, while accepting (often implicitly) the accompanying ontological commitments. Similarly, practitioners of EA modeling implicitly also commit to (different) ontologies, resulting in models that have an uncertain ontological standing. This is because, for the subject domain of enterprise architecture models (as opposed to the content of such models), no single ontology has gained major traction. As a result, studies into aspects of enterprise architecture models, such as “model quality” and “return on modeling effort”, are fragmented, and cannot readily be compared or combined. This paper proposes a comprehensive applied ontology, specifically geared to enterprise architecture modeling. Ontologies represent structured knowledge about a particular subject domain. It allows for study into, and reasoning about, that subject domain. Our ontology is derived from a theory of modeling, while clarifying concepts such as “enterprise architecture model”, and introduces novel concepts such as “model audience” and “model objective”. Furthermore, the relevant interrelations between these different concepts are identified and defined. The resulting ontology for enterprise architecture models is represented in OntoUML, and shown to be consistent with the foundational ontology for modeling, Unified Foundational Ontology.