Ontology-based Enterprise Conceptual Data Model, Taking TOGAF As An Example

Nowadays, Enterprises are making huge efforts in response to the rapidlychanging business environment. Among all these initiatives, Enterprise Architecture isconsidered as an increasingly significant one. Enterprise Architecture is a comprehen-sive description of all of the key elements and relationships which constituent an or-ganization. In other words, enterprise architecture is seen as a blueprint for systemat-ize units of enterprise components, including business processes, organizational, dataand information technology. However, due to the lack of semantic information, it isdifficult for human and systems to achieve accurate and consistent understanding ofenterprise architecture, leading to the misunderstandings within communication.Therefore, there are urgent needs for the semantics of the enterprise architecture to beclearly expressed.Enterprise Conceptual Data Model (ECDM) identifies and defines critical enter-prise business objects and/or data entities, as well as the relationship between theseentities (can be described as form of business rules). In Enterprise Architecture,ECDM is most closely related to Ontology, because it determines the key businessconcepts and the relationships between these concepts.To solve the problem mentioned above, this research chooses ECDM as thestarting point, attempting to use Ontology to add semantic information to EnterpriseArchitecture. the following two respects have been done,(1) Analyzing the Content Metamodel of TOGAF (The Open Group ArchitectureFramework), assuring that it is ECDM of TOGAF and pointing out the existing prob-lems in Content Metamodel.(2) Defining Content Metamodel in three levels: business terms, metamodel enti-ties and entity-relationship, in form of Ontology, thus improving semantic informationof Content Metamodel.Based on TOGAF Content Metamodel, this research brings out ontology-basedEnterprise Conceptual Data Model, providing technical support to help human andsystem understand the key business concepts and relationships among them and make the work of conceptual modeling more effectively.