Towards a Knowledge Base of Terms on Enterprise Architecture Debt

The term Enterprise Architecture (EA) Debt has been coined to grasp the difference between the actual state of the EA and its hypothetical, optimal state. Since its first definition in 2019, different theses have been conducted on the topic, and different articles have been published working on and with the term EA Debt. Consequently, using different terms has evolved to describe different phenomena within the domain. Due to the different authors involved in this development, perceiving these terms might differ. To avoid misunderstandings and to ease common understanding of the domain, we propose an ontology for the domain of EA Debt. We rely on a lightweight methodology for rapid ontology engineering (UPON light) and the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) to engineer our ontology.