Requirement Elicitation for Enterprise Information Systems : A Process Based on Meta-Model of Zachman Framework Developed using Ontologies

An enterprise information system distinguishes itself from other types of software as it is developed to facilitate the operation of an organization hence its requirement reflects its strategies, plans, processes etc. The requirements in the form of domain knowledge acquired during the early stage of development can be organized and modeled in an Enterprise Architecture. Zachman Framework is one of the most widely used Enterprise Architectures Framework. However, in the original Zachman Framework, there is neither a rigorous meta-model nor a well-defined sequence in which to instantiate the cells, which prevents it from being used practically during the requirement engineering phase of an enterprise information system project. We develop a conceptual meta-model for the Zachman Framework by adapting and integrating the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology and the Enterprise Ontology. Based on this meta-model, various requirement acquisition processes can be formulated by specifying a sequence to traverse the meta-model graph and instantiate its nodes and edges. In this thesis we present such a process, suitable for an enterprise system development project of a particular situation.