An Ontological Matching Approach for Enterprise Architecture Model Analysis

Enterprise architecture aligns business and information technology through the management of different elements and domains. Performing an integrated analysis of EA models using automated techniques is necessary when EA model representations grow in complexity, in order to support, for example, benchmarking of business processes or assessing compliance with requirements. Moreover, heterogeneity challenges arise from the frequent usage of multiple modelling languages, each based on a specific meta-model that cross-cuts distinct architectural domains. The motivation of this paper is, therefore, to investigate to what extent ontology matching techniques can be used as a means to improve the execution of automated analysis of EA model representations, based on the syntax, structure and semantic heterogeneities of these models. For that, we used AgreementMakerLight, an ontology matching system, to evaluate the matching of EA models based on the ArchiMate and BPMN languages.