Interoperability in enterprise modelling: requirements and roadmap

Interoperability is today considered as a key issue in the domain of ICT for enterprise organisations. One key point in interoperability is enterprise modelling. This paper deals with this class of interoperability and, more precisely, with Unified Enterprise Modelling Language (UEML). An analysis of existing solutions leads to the conclusion that there is no enterprise modelling theory supporting mapping between existing enterprise modelling formalisms and no tool for translation models. In conclusion, enterprise knowledge is segregated. A lot of enterprise modelling methods were developed on a practical basis, without identifying first the user requirements. The first contribution of this paper is to present a detail definition of what user requirements are to develop a unified language. Then, a framework for the classification and a methodology for collection of requirements are proposed. Moreover, attributes are assigned to requirements in order to evaluate them. The ten most important requirements are presented. The second contribution of this paper is to go further with presenting a roadmap for developing UEML using several approaches: top-down, bottom-up or a combined approach so-called hybrid approach. These three approaches are presented and compared. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.