From business goals to system goals using a verbs/goals ontology

Business processes constitute a robust enterprise model supporting the development of the information systems. Goals are an efficacy mechanism for expressing the systems' requirements, attaching the systems' specification to business processes. For the goal discovery and reduction, from business goals using a verbs/goals ontology, we propose the Goal Generating Functions (GGFs) acting at three abstraction levels: contextual, functional and physical. Domain Object Structures are introduced for furnishing the parameter of the reduced goals. The here proposed verbs/goals ontology constitutes a partition on the English verbs and determines three refinement levels: Process, Activity and action/states. The goals at the same abstraction level use typical representative verbs from the same level in the verbs/goals ontology. Process verbs/goals describe design goals corresponding to contextual abstraction level. Activity verbs/goals express service goals belonging to functional abstraction level. Action or state verbs/goals intervene at physical abstraction level and define the system goals. GGFs take parameters of business goals and produce, in turn, design goals, service goals and system goals. An example of E-Commerce illustrates the goal modelling.