Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

An Enterprise Ontology Approach for Defining Enterprise
Information Architecture
Bernardo Gomes, André Vasconcelos and Pedro Sousa
Instituto Superior Técnico, Oeiras, Portugal
INOV, Lisboa, Portugal
bernardosilvagomes@gmail.com
andre.vasconcelos@ist.utl.pt
pedro.sousa@ist.utl.pt
Abstract: The role played by information in organizations is becoming increasingly important, since it is
becoming clear its relevance as a central background for Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Engineering.
The enormous amount of Information in organizations leads to the development of Information Architectures in
order to support this problem. Thus, the Portuguese Public Administration, being aware of that, wants to be well
prepared regarding the information context, having a consistent Information Architecture to be used as a
reference. Such architecture aims to identify the fundamental business information, define the data independently
from the applications or systems, and provide the basis for corporative data management. This work aims to
contribute in the development of that Information Architecture, introducing the Enterprise Ontologies theme in the
Portuguese Public Administration context, as a new approach for Enterprise Architecture, especially for
Information Architecture development. In this paper we present a new methodology for developing Information
Architecture, based on the DEMO methodology, in particular in the Transaction concept in order to extract
Information Entities, their Attributes and Relationships for an Information Architecture. In our research this
methodology is being tested in some case studies among the Portuguese Public Administration. The
methodology proposed major steps are: (1) collecting of the necessary amount of data about the case study, (2)
which must be resumed in some legible text. From that text, the first steps of DEMO are performed ((3) Performa-
Informa-Forma Analysis, (4) Coordination-Actors-Production Analysis, (5) Transaction Pattern Synthesis), in
order to identify the Transactions that describe that environment. Based on those Transactions, (6) both the
Information Entities and Attributes are identified. In order to identify Relationships between those entities, (7) the
Result Structure Analysis step is performed. To complete the methodology, and based on the previously results,
an (8) Entity-Relationship is designed to represent the entities and their relationships.
Keywords: enterprise architecture, information architecture, information entities, attributes, relationships,
enterprise ontologies, DEMO
1. Introduction
Despite the awareness that we live today in an information society, in many organizations information
is still not well managed (Martin, Dmitriev and Akeroyd, 2010: 6-12). Thus, Information Architecture
(IA) arises as a top discipline towards the improvement of information management, since it can be
viewed as a structured set of multidimensional interrelated elements that support all information
processes (Watson, 2000: 7059). The highest-level of IA is usually very similar among organizations
from the same business area (Inmon, 2000), which allows the development of reference IAs. Public
administration is not an exception in this context, since the amount of information that it deals with is
larger and more dispersed. This sense, it also must have an IA that describes the information entities
that underlie the business processes execution (Vasconcelos, 2007).
This work proposes to contribute to the development of an IA to the Portuguese public administration,
susceptible to be used as a reference. It intends to identify and describe the information entities that
cut across the entire public administration. Furthermore, it proposes a new approach to the
formulation of that IA, so that it also considers the essence, coherence, consistence, completeness
and objectivity that should be important features of it. This new approach is based in the enterprise
ontologies theme, taking in consideration the DEMO methodology.
Figure 1 presents the problem definition, using a conceptual map. In that picture, the most relevant
motivation concepts are depicted, and also how they are related to each other. Finally, the
relationships stressed with an orange dashed line are the core problems of this work.
This article is structured in order to address the main themes that are the support for this work. Firstly
there is a review in terms of the ‘state of the art’, in order to describe the major theoretical concepts
that support this work. The themes covered are: enterprise ontologies (including the Ѱ-theory and
DEMO) and information architecture (including Inmon taxonomy). After this theoretical review, it will
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