Transformation of Enterprise Model to Enterprise Ontology

Abstract: Enterprise models are usually developed with ambition to capture the current or desired situation in enterprises with respect to performed or planned processes, organizational structure (including organization units, roles and competences), products or services produced and IT systems available in the enterprise.The above aspects are mutually reflective. Such enterprise models are often represented in formal modeling languages, like UEML (Unified Enterprise Modeling Language) or GEM (General Entity Manipulator) language allowing for the development of applications, which interprets or compute them. Enterprise ontologies basically allow the representation of the same aspects of an enterprise (processes, organizational structure, products and systems). However, enterprise ontologies use another representation (like OWL- Web Ontology Language) and often are developed for other application purposes than enterprise model. The objective of this thesis is to develop strategies for transforming enterprise models into enterprise ontologies.  There should be maximum preservation of semantics and minimum loss of information during the process of transformation. On the basis of meta-model (model to model) transformation, we propose three elements mapping approaches. Each approach has a number of elements mapping rules. After comparative study the best suitable approach according to objective of this thesis is selected for implementation purpose. From a technical perspective, a tool named “EM2EO” is developed, which accepts an enterprise model as input and produces ontology as output.