Abstract. Modeling the enterprise from different views, at different levels of abstraction, and in different modeling languages yields a variety of models. Oftentimes the models referring to the same subject exist independently of each other and their semantic relations are hard to discover or to analyze. This fact hinders the effective exploitation of enterprise models for the purpose of integration and interoperability. The method proposed in this paper is based on semantic annotations and aims for the externalization and machine readability of the model contained information. This assures the accessibility for further automatic processing and facilitates the discovery and analysis of inter-model relations.Keywords: enterprise modeling, semantic annotation, model reconciliation, inter-model relations.
IntroductionIn today's economy enterprises operate in a fast changing environment and their competitiveness heavily depends on their ability to quickly respond to these changes in an adequate manner. In this context, decision makers use enterprise models as a means to master this complexity. Depending on the focus in a particular case, models allow to take a certain view and abstraction on the enterprise and concentrate on the goals, processes, structures, competencies, etc. Further, particular models can be broken down into more detailed sub-models. Overall, this yields a "collection of more or less interrelated, special-purpose models" [1]. In contrast to modeling activities known from the field of operations research, business process (re-)engineering, organizational design etc., enterprise modeling accounts for the "need to focus on enterprises as a whole, or at least on a larger set of interacting components, within organization -taking a more 'total systems' approach" [2]. According to [3] the main motivations for enterprise modeling are:• The possibility to analyze the enterprise, in order to gain a better understanding and to enable the management of system complexity.• Explicit documentation of enterprise knowledge (know-what, know-how, and know-why).