Rediscovering Zachman Framework using ontology from a requirement engineering perspective

An information system distinguishes itself from other software as it is developed to facilitate the operation of an organization, hence it reflects its strategies, plans, organizations, processes, marketing etc. We believe that the requirement in the form of domain knowledge acquired in the early stage of system development can be organized and modeled in Enterprise Architecture. However research in Enterprise Architecture focus on other issues rather than requirement engineering. Hence we propose several new ideas on the extension of Zachman Framework, one of the most widely used Enterprise Architectures. We first partition Zachman Framework from two different perspectives, domain engineering phases and requirement engineering techniques. Then we propose a meta-model for Zachman Framework which is adapted and integrated from the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology and Enterprise Ontology. © 2009 IEEE.