Hi Cory and All
I want to collaborate with you on this.
I believe we’ve discussed a similar
topic when we met each other when I brief Rick Murphy of GSA a few months ago, so
I refer you again to the “ontology-based” approach to EA,
documented using a “model-driven-architecture” (MDA) technique, which
I previously applied in a Federal EA project and subsequently briefed to the
SICoP.. See http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SICoPConference_2005_09_14#nid2YF3,
slides 6-9.
The approach presented in this
presentation file, which I refer to in this forum as a “general ontology”
approach, is intended to provide a practical and attainable “operational
enterprise architecture” to its implementers. The approach is available at
no additional cost for internal use by the U.S. Federal Executive Branch under the
Creative Commons license.
Roy
From: ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontac-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Cory Casanave
Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2005
9:08 AM
To: 'ONTAC-WG General Discussion';
SemanticCore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ontac-forum]
Collaboration on semantic core and upper ontologies
Last week I introduced GSA, OsEra and our work on
“Semantic Core” as a mid to upper level ontology for architecture.
Thus far we have primarily “farmed”, integrated and
generalized concepts out of existing architectural languages (E.G. UML, BPMN,
EDOC) and frameworks (E.G. FEARMO, ISO 11179, DRM). Most of these source
languages and frameworks are not defined in terms of Ontologies and thus we are
defining and refactoring a common framework. However, we do not want to
make another “concept island” and thus would like to have these
concepts grounded in at least one of the well worked out upper
Ontologies. This note is a request for collaborators to do so. We
need to select a base ontology and work to align the concepts and then make the
explicit relationships.
We need to select the base upper ontology based on;
- Ability to use it within our
open source project
- Maturity and stability
- Support and available expertise
- Compatibility with industry
directions
- Expressiveness
Expressiveness in an architectural sense means that most of
the concepts of modern architecture can be defined. We have a strong
focus on defining interoperability between systems (both human and technical
systems), process, interactions, roles and collaborations. We express
business rules, vocabularies, goals, requirements and process. Process in
particular is very important and this, of course defines behavior and change
over time. As is clear from some of our threads, context is crucial in
understanding these architectures. We understand how challenging some of
these concepts are for Ontologies but feel it is our job to capture the domain
semantics, more so than guaranteeing we can reason across them completely.
A primary purpose of these architectures will be to support
the full life-cycle of business and systems specification as well as to support
the model driven architecture pattern of provisioning from high-level
architectures to technology specifications and implementations supporting the
business architecture. We see a lot of potential for using ontology tools
and techniques to support the architectural process, to provide more precise
architectures and to get more value out of architecture. Unlike some of
the ontology visions we are more focused on the MDA “provisioning
pattern” to support enterprise scale information systems and integration
at runtime than extensive use of Ontologies as part of a runtime infrastructure
(but that is another thread!).
While we find the work to merge upper Ontologies
interesting, our focus is to use such an ontology for this purpose.
Anyone interested in participating should contact me
directly.
Regards,
Cory Casanave
Data Access Technologies, GSA-OsEra