Expressiveness of Enterprise Modelling Languages

Abstract

This master thesis investigates expressiveness required to support the most important applications of enterprise architecture and to represent corresponding models. The workfollows a design research procedure and relies on literature as well as on an interview in the field of Business Service Management (BSM). As formal representation languages RDF(S), OWL and SWRL are considered. The initial assumption was that one or a combination of these representation languages would be adequate to fulfill the requirements of the most important applications. Thus, the thesis statement is formulated accordingly. Besides the representation of models (i.e. aspects of BPMN and UML), this thesis studies applications such as verification and analysis of models, compliance management, model execution and monitoring. These applications are discussed with respect to possible representation formalisms in order to fullfill the application requirements, i.e. the capability of deducing the required knowledge. A second line of action addresses the requirements gathered from the interview and describes the development and implementation of a corresponding scenario. The scenario actually has several similarities to the more general applications. In particular parts from dependency analysis and execution monitoring are related to the scenario. One of the results is a catalogue of representation requirements which was continuously updated during the development phase. Some of these requirements summarise a couple of language features (e.g. different types of restrictions). On this level, representation requirements are assigned to application requirements. Further the representation requirements are mapped to the representation languages - RDF(S), OWL and SWRL. On this basis, suitable languages can be selected....