Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) SKOS Ontologies

Background

As part of the eGov initiative, the U.S. federal government (led by the GSA and the OMB) developed the Federal Enterprise Architecture Reference Model (FEARM). The FEARM includes a wide variety of information assets that can be used to align descriptions of information architecture across multiple government agencies.

In 2006, TopQuadrant, under a contract with GSA, developed OWL models of FEARM, which were published as FEA-RMO, the FEA Reference Model Ontologies. A record of this work is accessible at web-services.gov. At oeGov, we are publishing a simplified form of the FEARM using SKOS, the W3C Recommendation for Simple Knowledge Organization Systems.

Overview

Essential to the FEARM is a set of four vocabularies; the Business Reference Model, the Performance Reference Model, the Service Component Reference Model and the Technology Reference Model. Each of these constitutes a hierarchy of controlled terms that can be used to describe the enterprise architecture of an agency. A fifth model is the Data Reference Model (DRM), this is currently not represented in an OWL model. However the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) has been converted to OWL and may be made available at oeGOV in the future.

The FEA is currently published both in PDF (as descriptions of these terms) and in XML (concentrating on the structure of the terms). But neither of these official publications is amenable to use as linked data. In particular, there is no global unique identifier for any of the terms. Most applications of the FEA use the print name of a term as a reference. But these names do not constitute unique references; there are twenty-two occasions in which two terms in the FEA have the same name. They can, of course, be disambiguated by provided the complete context in which the name occurs, but the FEA provides no means for constructing such a reference. Hence many existing applications currently make ambiguous references to these twenty-two terms.

Motivation for SKOS-based publication of the FEA Model

As part of the GSA OSERA InfraStructure Project (OISP), we assigned URIs to all terms in the FEA. In most cases, the URIs end with a name that can be derived directly from the print name of the term. This is not possible when the print names are not unique. In those cases, we created URIs based on the long description of the term. The following table shows the twenty-two ambiguous terms, and the URIs we have chosen to disambiguate them. In a few cases, we had to create two new URIs; in most cases, we created one new URI for one usage of a term, and used the term itself as the basis for the other URI.

SKOS rendering of the FEA vocabularies does not represent any of the linkages between the vocabularies; in particular, the relation between Business Lines and Performance Measures outlined in the FEARM are not present. But all terms in the FEARM are represented in these files; extensions to represent these connections can be made as linked data extensions.

FEA Ontologies

The following Ontologies make up the FEA SKOS Models:

Last Updated August 14, 2009

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.