A Lightweight Ontology for Enterprise Architecture Mining of API Gateway Logs

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is defined as a set of principles, methods, and models that support the design of organizational structures, expressing the different concerns of a company and its IT landscape, including processes, services, applications, and data. One role of EA management is to automate modeling tasks and maintain up-to-date EA models while reality changes. However, EA modeling still relies primarily on manual methods. Contributing to EA modeling automation, EA Mining is an approach that uses data mining techniques for EA modeling and management. It automatically captures existing information in operational databases to generate architectural models and views. This paper presents an ontology for EA Mining that focuses on generating architectural models from API gateway log files. An ontology defines the concepts and relationships among them to uniquely describe a domain of interest and specify the meaning of the terms. API Gateways are information technology components that serve as a facade between information systems and enterprise business partners. The ontology development methodology followed the SABiO process, whereas the Unified Foundational Ontology provided the foundations of the ontology and OntoUML, the ontology modeling language. An experiment in an e-commerce application scenario was conducted to evaluate the theoretical feasibility and applicability of the ontology. Automatic semantic and syntactic validation tools and semi-structured expert interviews were used to confirm the desired ontology properties. This study aims to contribute to the evolution of the knowledge base of EA Management.