Identifying Business Components on the Basis of an Enterprise Ontology

Companies are more and more focusing on their core competencies, outsourcingbusiness tasks to their business partners. In order to support collaboration between businesspartners, adequate information systems need to be built automating inter-organizationalbusiness processes. The bases for such information systems are business componentscombining software artefacts from different vendors to applications which are individual toeach customer. The crucial factors in identifying and building reusable, marketable and selfcontainedbusiness components are the appropriateness and the quality of the underlyingbusiness domain models. This paper therefore introduces a process for the identification ofbusiness components based on an enterprise ontology, being a business domain modelsatisfying well defined quality criteria.