An Ontological Analysis of Service Modeling at ArchiMate's Business Layer

ArchiMate is a widely-adopted enterprise architecture language based on the "service orientation" paradigm. Although its support for service orientation has had great impact in the representation of (service-oriented) enterprise architectures in the last 10 years, the representation of services in ArchiMate is not without problems. In particular, the predominance of the perspective of service as "unit of functionality" hides some important social aspects inherent to service relations and makes some of the models that the language produces ambiguous. In order to address some of these issues, in this paper we discuss an ontological analysis of service modeling fragments of ArchiMate's Business layer. This analysis is based on UFO-S, a reference ontology that characterizes the notion of service by applying the concepts of commitments and claims and harmonizing several views of services from a broad perspective. We contribute to: (i) providing real-world semantics to service modeling fragments in ArchiMate based on the notion of service commitments/claims, and (ii) offering recommendations in the form of modeling patterns to ensure expressiveness and to clarify the semantics of service elements.