An Enterprise Ontology Approach for Defining Enterprise Information Architecture

The role played by information in organizations is becoming increasingly important, since it is becoming clear its relevance as a central background for Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Engineering. The enormous amount of Information in organizations leads to the development of Information Architectures in order to support this problem. Thus, the Portuguese Public Administration, being aware of that, wants to be well prepared regarding the information context, having a consistent Information Architecture to be used as a reference. Such architecture aims to identify the fundamental business information, define the data independently from the applications or systems, and provide the basis for corporative data management. This work aims to contribute in the development of that Information Architecture, introducing the Enterprise Ontologies theme in the Portuguese Public Administration context, as a new approach for Enterprise Architecture, especially for Information Architecture development. In this paper we present a new methodology for developing Information Architecture, based on the DEMO methodology, in particular in the Transaction concept in order to extract Information Entities, their Attributes and Relationships for an Information Architecture. In our research this methodology is being tested in some case studies among the Portuguese Public Administration. The methodology proposed major steps are: (1) collecting of the necessary amount of data about the case study, (2) which must be resumed in some legible text. From that text, the first steps of DEMO are performed ((3) Performa-Informa-Forma Analysis, (4) Coordination-Actors-Production Analysis, (5) Transaction Pattern Synthesis), in order to identify the Transactions that describe that environment. Based on those Transactions, (6) both the Information Entities and Attributes are identified. In order to identify Relationships between those entities, (7) the Result Structure Analysis step is performed. To complete the methodology, and based on the previously results, an (8) Entity-Relationship is designed to represent the entities and their relationships.