Identifying Business Components on the Basis of an Enterprise Ontology

Abstract

Companies are more and more focusing on their core competencies, outsourcing business tasks to their business partners. In order to support collaboration between business partners, adequate information systems need to be built automating inter-organizational business processes. The bases for such information systems are business components combining software artefacts from different vendors to applications which are individual to each customer. The crucial factors in identifying and building reusable, marketable and selfcontained business components are the appropriateness and the quality of the underlying business domain models. This paper therefore introduces a process for the identification of business components based on an enterprise ontology, being a business domain model satisfying well defined quality criteria.

On the Use of a Role Ontology to Consistently Design Business Processes

“…Other approaches that use ontologies to specify business processes (e.g. [20][21][22]) also lack the means to identify atomic activities and to consistently decompose a process.…”

Benefits of Enterprise Ontology for the Development of ICT-Based Value Networks

“…The enterprise ontology for the SSND case contains all essential information for that business domain. The business components identification (BCI) method [24][25][26] applied in this section aims at grouping business tasks and their corresponding information objects into business components satisfying defined metrics. The metrics used -being loosely coupling and tight cohesion -are the basic metrics for the component-based development of inter-enterprise business applications focusing on the deployment of components that can be used in different enterprise systems [42][43][44].…”

“…This article builds on previous work regarding enterprise ontology [21,22] and business components [24][25][26]. To exemplify the usability of the proposed enterprise ontology and the identification of business components the domain of strategic supply network development [27][28][29] is introduced as a practical application of interenterprise information systems.…”

The Benefit of Enterprise Ontology in Identifying Business Components

“…In using the BCI-3D method, different business component models could be generated for several business domains, e.g., for the domain of strategic supply network development (as presented in this paper), of educational administration, of automotive industry and of network operators. Its predecessor, the BCI method (Business Components Identification) [24], focused only on relationships between information objects and process steps, without taking into account the other types of relationships (between different information objects, and between different process steps). With this 'old' BCI method, however, we also generated component models for several domains.…”