Advancing Toward a Reference Ontology for Enterprise Architecture Mining from APIs

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a coherent set of principles, methods, and models that express the structure and behavior of an enterprise and its IT landscape. EA mining uses data mining techniques to automate EA models’ extraction. Ontologies help to define concepts and the relationships among these concepts to describe a domain of interest. This paper presents an extensible ontology for EA mining to extract models using Application Program Interface (API) log files as the data source. The ontology development follows the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) and uses OntoUML 2.0 language to ensure its expressiveness and readability. To validate its theoretical feasibility and contribution to EA modeling, it presents a simulation of the ontology application through a controlled scenario using data structures similar to an industrial case. Then, the ontology is verified and validated, checking quality ontology criteria using specialized tools for syntactic and semantic model checking, which also aids in avoiding ontology anti-patterns.