The Benefit of Enterprise Ontology in Identifying Business Components

Companies are more than ever participating in so-called value networks while being confronted with an increasing need for collaboration with their business partners. In order to better perform in such value networks information systems supporting not only the intrabut also the inter-enterprise business processes are necessary in order to enable and ease collaboration between business partners. Therefore, they need to be interoperable. As the basis for building these information systems the concepts of enterprise ontology and business components are very promising. The notion of enterprise ontology, as presented in this paper, is a powerful revelation of the essence of an enterprise or an enterprise network. Reusable and self-contained business components with well-defined interaction points facilitate the accessing and execution of coherent packages of business functionality. The identification of business components, however, is still a crucial factor. The reported research seeks to improve the identification of business components based on the ontological model of an enterprise, satisfying well-defined quality