About the European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA) Ontology
The EIRA ontology is the machine-readable knowledge representation of EIRA© including classes and axioms, which provide stakeholders of different backgrounds – including technical and business - with the capabilities to search, access and analyse the EIRA© concepts. An Ontology is a formal description of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain and the axioms connecting concepts and allowing for logic inferences. An ontology is composed of the the terminological component (T-Box), assertions component (A-Box) and the rules for logic inference: the semantics “part”.
Why an ontology for the EIRA©?
The CarTool is a very effective solution for a ‘technical’ audience, i.e. enterprise architects, with a background in Enterprise Architecture modelling and familiar with Enterprise Architecure notations like Archimate. Nevertheless, is the CarTool the best fit for a business audience not familiar with Enterprise Architecture concepts? How can we unlock the value of the EIRA artefacts to a business audience, while preserving the intrinsic unambiguity of the EIRA vocabulary? The EIRA ontology is a business instrument supporting enabling business stakeholders to consult the EIRA concepts in an easy and accessible way, without using the CarTool.
Main use cases
- Portfolio management: the EIRA ontology can be linked to project/portfolio ontologies for decision-making on IT investments;
- Online European Interoperability Cartography: the EIRA ontology can be used to publish the EIC on Cellar to provide more powerful semantic queries on its content;
- Link EIRA concepts to National Reference Architectures concepts: the EIRA ontology can be used to link EIRA and national reference architectures concepts;
- Consult interoperability specifications: the EIRA ontology can be used to link EIRA and ELIS and make them accessible on Cellar
The EIRA Ontology v1.0.0 beta has been released on the 3rd of August 2021. The content of the release has been developed through an agile project management approach. Tickets from EC internal and external stakeholders have been analysed in order to address their feedback and requirements.
Related release: EIRA v.4.0.0
The European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA©) is an architecture content metamodel defining the most salient architectural building blocks (ABBs) needed to build interoperable e-Government systems. The EIRA© provides a common terminology that can be used by people working for public administrations in various architecture and system development tasks