Enterprise Architecture (EA) metamodels align an organisation’s business, information and technology resources so that these assets best meet the organisation’s purpose. The Layered EA Development (LEAD) Ontology enhances EA practices by a metamodel with layered metaobjects as its building blocks interconnected by semantic relations. Each metaobject connects to another metaobject by two semantic relations in opposing directions, thus highlighting how each metaobject views other metaobjects from its perspective. While the resulting two directed graphs reveal all the multiple pathways in the metamodel, more desirable would be to have one directed graph that focusses on the dependencies in the pathways. Towards this aim, using CG-FCA (where CG refers to Conceptual Graph and FCA to Formal Concept Analysis) and a LEAD case study, we determine an algorithm that elicits the active as opposed to the passive semantic relations between the metaobjects resulting in one directed graph metamodel. We also identified the general applicability of our algorithm to any metamodel that consists of triples of objects with active and passive relations.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) uses metamodels to document and align organisations' business, information, and technology domains. This structure then enables these domains to work in harmony. Layered Enterprise Architecture Development (LEAD) builds upon EA by introducing layered metaobjects connected by semantic relations that make up LEAD's layered metamodel. Previously, an algorithm was developed to elicit active semantic relations to achieve a view highlighting the metaobject dependencies. Subsequently, CG-FCA (Conceptual Graph and Formal Concept Analysis) and a LEAD case study were used to develop an enhanced algorithm that also generates the LEAD layers. The resulting layered FCA lattice shows a way to discover the hitherto hidden insights in LEAD, including the relationship between business and information technology.

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