TOGAF® Content Metamodel Ontology

This is version 2.0.0 of the TOGAF Content Metamodel ontology. It is based on the Content Metamodel of the TOGAF Version 9.2 standard. See TOGAF 9.2 Content Metamodel for the complete set of entities, attributes and relationships.

Changes in version 2 of the ontology

1. Uses the name Business Service instead of Service to stay consistent with the original ontology and TOGAF 9.2 Metamodel Figure 30-7.
2. Adds decomposition and relevant inverse properties that were missing in the version 1 of the metamodel ontology.
3. Adds Business Capability decomposition and inverse properties that are absent in TOGAF 9.2 to make this ontology more practical. In most cases, people are interested in business capabilities breakdown and impact assessment.
4. Adds inverse property flag for communicates with and related to properties for Logical Application Component, Function and Physical Application Component.
5. Collapses multiple properties from TOGAF 9.2 using AndOr convention to improve the usability of the ontology. Properties can be sub-classed later if needed.
6. Keeps precedes of follows as a single property of Process as per TOGAF 9.2 section 30.7. Properties can be sub-classed later if needed.
7. Fixes inconsistent property naming in TOGAF 9.2 section 30.7 to create togaf:informationSystemServiceIsUsedByDataEntity, togaf:logicalApplicationComponentIsUsedByLogicalDataComponent and togaf:physicalApplicationComponentIsUsedByPhysicalDataComponent to improve usability of the ontology.
8. Fixed inconsistent property naming for Business Capability in TOGAF 9.2 by using togaf:businessCapabilityIsUsedByOrganizationUnit
9. Removes duplicate togaf:logicalTechnologyComponentServesLogicalApplicationComponent found in TOGAF 9.2 section 30.7.
10. Adds hasCategory property with no domain or range specified. Updates restrictions on togaf:ArchitectureComponent and togaf:AssociationObjects. Although linking to skos:Concept is preferred, there are no limitations as to what resource can be used to specify the category of an entity.

Ontology Versioning Choices

Given low prior adoption of the ontology and disruptive changes to many classes disjoint statements due to Location moving to General Entities, the decision is to adopt entirely new Ontology URI for TOGAF 9.2. For earlier discussion on ontology versioning see Ontology Design Patterns Versioning and URIs and OWL Guide Ontology Versioning.

Taxonomy Design Choices

Both JSON-LD and Turtle serializations are provided out of the box to improve adoption.

Prior Work

Original from https://sites.google.com/site/ontologyprojects/home/togaf-core-content-metamodel is used with permission from Aurona Gerber.

Based on the paper Towards the Formalisation of the TOGAF Content Metamodel using Ontologies by Aurona Gerber, Paula Kotze and Alta van der Merwe which is using TOGAF 9.1 Content Metamodel.

A regulatory impact analysis solution based on the ontology was presented at the Semantic Web London meetup. Source code is available on https://github.com/cadmiumkitty/ontologies-for-enterprise-architecture, and the slides are on https://www.slideshare.net/EugeneMorozov/documenting-enterprise-architectures-using-ontologies.

Taxonomy mapping and transformation is based on MoneyAggVoc.

Tools

Ontology can be viewed in TopBraid EDG and WebProtege once you create an account.

1. TOGAF 9.2 Content Metamodel Ontology
2. TOGAF 9.1 Content Metamodel Ontology

Taxonomy import and visualization have been tested with VocBench 3 and TopBraid EDG. For more tools see Software for Controlled Vocabularies list maintained by BARTOC.

Taxonomies for Confluence can be used to index Confluence pages and use Confluence as an architecture repository.

Trademarks

TOGAF is a registered trademark of The Open Group.