Semantics-oriented approach for information interoperability and governance:towards user-centric enterprise architecture management

Enterprise architecture (EA) efforts focus on business, technology, data, and application architecture, and their integration. However, less attention has been given to one of the most critical EA elements, i.e., users (EA audiences). As a result, existing EA management systems (EAMS) have become old, large, content-centric document-repositories that are unable to provide meaningful information of use to the enterprise users and aligned with their needs and functional scope. We argue that a semantic technology based mechanism focusing on enterprise information and user-centricity has the potential to solve this problem. In this context, we present a novel ontology-based strategy named the user-centric semantics-oriented EA (U-SEA) model. Based on this model, we have developed a user-centric semantics-oriented enterprise architecture management (U-SEAM) system. Our approach is generic enough to be used in a wide variety of user-centric EAM applications. The results obtained show computational feasibility to integrate and govern enterprise information and to reduce complexity with respect to interoperability between enterprise information and users.