A New Approach to Semantically Derive Enterprise Information Architecture from Business Process Architecture

The design of enterprise information architecture (EIA) is a critical success factor of the information management capability of an enterprise. The EIA design not only supports business process re-engineering activity but can also facilitate radical design of new business processes. This paper demonstrates that EIA can be derived semantically from the business process architecture, hence overcoming the classical problems of time-consuming interviews for business information analysts by using semantically enriched BPA to derive information entities and processes with the help of domain and process ontologies. The cancer care and registration process of a health organisation has been used as a case-study for demonstration purposes. This approach is currently being transformed into a generic Framework for semantic enterprise information architecture design with an aim to bridge the gap between business architectures and enterprise information architectures.