Federal Enterprise Architecture Reference Model Ontology (FEA-RMO)

Background

The Federal Enterprise Architecture Reference Model Ontology (FEA-RMO) is a domain specific ontology of the Federal Enterprise Architecture reference models. FEA-RMO directly translates the Performance, Business, Service Component, and Technical reference models into their executable representation in OWL-DL.

Purpose

FEA-RMO is intended to serve as a catalyst for innovation and competition for academic researchers and entrepreneurs advancing Semantic Web technologies and semantic interoperability. The project team's goal was to provide execution, reasoning, and validation of four mandatory use cases over the specified ontologies using Jena2.1 as a reference implementation. The four mandatory use cases were: Shared Concept, Line of Sight, Semantic Detective, and Legislative and Best Practice Drivers. The project team was able to able to accomplish some, but not all, of its goals during the specified project period.

Principles

FEA-RMO's design was driven by principles of parsimony, simplicity, and utility. To ensure parsimony in the ontology, the project team included only terms and concepts defined in the reference models. To achieve simplicity and utility, the project team provided both the merged and split versions of the ontology.

Installation Instructions

Merged model does not really need instructions, except for the advice to build a new project if they have problem (see below)

Modular models can be worked with in the following way (only for people experienced in working with multiple modular ontologies): Create a "Models" directory directly under C:/ Create "eGov" subdirectory under "Models" Create "FEA" subdirectory under "eGov" Place all models there Place the ontpolicy file included in the release in the "edu.stanford.smi.protegex.owl" directory. This directory can be found under Program Files -> Protege_3.0_beta -> plugins You should now be able to open, view (and modify should you want to) BRM, PRM, SRM and/or TRM. You do not need to do anything special to see the connections between SRM and BRM or SRM and TRM and so on. These connections are part of the models. The only bridge in the model of its own is the one that connects the BRM and the PRM. To see in Protege how these two models relate to each other, you will need to build a new project from the BRM2PRM.owl file. Protege will load both, the BRM and the PRM (as well as the FEA core which is always loaded). You can explore ontologies, but do not save the project - you will get triple drift explained in the report (this was the case with 3.0 version, I have not tested if the problem was fixed in 3.1 version of Protégé). You can make the BRM2PRM.owl file "read only" to prevent from erroneously overwriting it.
Alternatively to creating directories specified above, people can place models in any directory, but they would then have to edit their policy file to reflect the placement.
I also suggest to add the following advice: If people are having problems loading Protégé project files, they should build a new project from the owl file(s). To build a new project from the file: Launch Protege. You will see a dialog with "new" and "build" buttons. Select "OWL Files" from the Project Format options and click on "build". Use the browse dialog that comes up next to select the owl file. Click OK.

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Contact Information

FEA-RMO is licensed under the Open Source E-Gov Reference Architecture (OSERA) open source license agreement from the General Services Administration (GSA). GSA provides no support for use and maintenance of FEA-RMO. For general information and comments you may contact Rick Murphy or George Thomas. For information on FEA-RMO design and implementation, you may contact Ralph Hodgson of TopQuadrant, Inc.

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