Application of the Eclipse EMF technology for multifaceted organization modelling

Business Informatics. 2016. Vol. 37. No. 3. P. 15–29.

Babkin E., Radzinskaia O.

This research paper explores the most developed methodologies used for multifaceted modeling of organizational structures. It is asserted that the existing methodologies (DEMO – Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations, BORM – Business Object Relation Modeling and OntoUML) provide tools for analysis of the organization and its business processes through diff erent ways. They lead to diff erent results and make the process of organization modeling complicated. There is no software to support work with these methodologies together. The purpose of this research is to create a unifi ed meta-model (within the Eclipse EMF technology) for a new methodology based on the existing ones and to analyze the completeness of these methodologies for describing enterprise architecture. It will serve as a basis for a new open software platform for multifaceted modeling of the organization. In this research, we have compared the above-mentioned methodologies and concluded that despite the fact that these methodologies provide an analysis of diff erent aspects of organizational structure, they have a common basic set of concepts. This study demonstrates the implementation of the Ecore model that is built on the basis of the selected group of common elements of these methodologies. We have also found that the combination of the considered methodologies contains all the concepts inherent in the systematic approach to the modeling of organizational structure. Furthermore, we have demonstrated the aspects of the organization that can be modeled by the methodologies considered. Using the Zachman framework, it was shown that: the DEMO, BORM and OntoUML methodologies allow us to describe in detail the business processes that take place at diff erent levels of the organization, from the ontological to the datalogical, and therefore provide comprehensive information for the multifaceted modeling of an organization. However, none of the existing methodologies takes the time component and goal-setting into consideration.

Keywords: DEMO, DEMO, enterprise architecture, архитектура предприятия, multifaceted organization modeling, BORM, OntoUML, unified methodology, Zachman framework, Eclipse EMF, systematic approach to the modeling of an organization, многоаспектное моделирование организации, BORM, OntoUML, унифицированная методология, модель Захмана, Eclipse EMF, систематическое моделирование организации