Component Matching Approach in Linking Business and Application Architecture
Suresh Kamath
TL;DR
The paper addresses how to automatically link business and application architectures by formalizing both as pseudo-categories and using a typed functor to relate them. It defines a rigorous framework based on interfaces, contracts, and complete contracts, and introduces publication contracts and protocol-based matching to determine component reuse or adaptation. The key contribution is a two-stage matching approach (signature followed by protocol) supported by a formal treatment of provided/required interfaces and interaction protocols, with use cases in insurance to illustrate practical application. The work lays the groundwork for tool support to automate component matching and outlines future work on efficient protocol generation and adaptation when no exact match is available.
Abstract
The development of an IT strategy and ensuring that it is the best possible one for business is a key problem many organizations face. This problem is that of linking business architecture to IT architecture in general and application architecture specifically. In our earlier work we proposed Category theory as the formal language to unify the business and IT worlds with the ability to represent the concepts and relations between the two in a unified way. We used rCOS as the underlying model for the specification of interfaces, contracts, and components. The concept of pseudo-category was then utilized to represent the business and application architecture specifications and the relationships contained within. The linkages between them now can be established using the matching of the business component contracts with the application component contracts. However the matching was based on manual process and in this paper we extend the work by considering automated component matching process. The ground work for a tool to support the matching process is laid out in this paper.