Ontological evaluation of business models: comparing traditional and component-based paradigms in information systems re-engineering

The majority of current information systems were implemented using traditional paradigms which include business modeling techniques applied during the analysis phase such as Data Flow Diagrams and Entity-Relationship Diagrams. These legacy systems are now struggling to cope with recent developments, particularly trends towards e-Commerce applications, platform independence, reusability of pre-built components, capacity for reconfiguration and higher reliability. Many organizations now realize they need to re-engineer their systems using new component-based systems. Although the traditional and component-based approaches have different grammars for representing business models, these business models can be compared, based on their ontological grammars. This paper illustrates how an ontological evaluation of business models by using the Bunge-Wand-Weber model can be used to compare them for equivalency of representation of business requirements, when re-engineering legacy systems into component-based information systems.