The OIAr as a semantic knowledge base
Introduction
The Open Infrastructure Architecture repository (OIAr) is a knowledge management system that runs on the combination of MediaWiki (MW), and the MediaWiki extension Semantic MediaWiki (SMW).
The basis of semantic knowledge representation
In the OIAr, many pages represent an instance of a specific concept. For instance, the page GF.Backup represents an instance of the concept Generic Function.
The OIAr information model
The knowledge items in this repository are interrelated according to the Open Infrastructure Architecture method (OIAm). This method uses the ArchiMate architecture modelling language to create architecture models. As a consequence, the relations between the knowledge items can be described in an ArchiMate meta-model. This meta-model is converted into a semantic representation according to the following diagram:
Note that relations are defined at the base of the arrow, so you can "read" them in the direction of the arrow: "Generic Pattern" "Realizes" "Generic Service".
This Information Model is used as the underlying structure of the OIAr and its semantic embedding in this knowledge management system:
- The ArchiMate concepts (represented by the light gray rectangles) can be found Categories in this knowledge management system. An instance of such a concept belongs to the corresponding category (e.g. Generic Function "Backup" is a member of Category:Generic Function).
- Relations between concepts are recorded as semantic properties; these relations can be found in this page;
- There are OIAm concepts that are not relations between items, but rather attributes of an item. The most important example is the infrastructure Quality Attribute; these are registered as Properties with pre-defined values.