From Sustainable Information System with a Farandole of Models to Services - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 9

be extended, in particular in the reverse direction from the IS conceptual world to the
activities world. Therefore, they developed the domain of requirements engineering
[ 28] oriented towards IS and their results became very useful for software engineer-
ing and information technologies too. The following steps are to release IS from too
functional aspects and then to propose strategic approaches notably by introducing
intentional approaches [ 25, 26] . In fact, the IS domain with its knowledge and its
methods has a real and increasing influence on the activities world.
There are other exchanges and influences which go through the overlap between
the IS conceptual world and the activities world, for instance, by means of schemas
of business processes (e.g. [ 20] ) and use cases [ 1] to study special situations of
actors. More and more, the IS conceptual world plays the role of the basis of a large
part of the activities world.
3.4 Ontology for IS
Implementing IS inside an enterprise transforms its organization and sometimes also
its activities. Behind these transformations there are elements that stay stable. It is
important to maintain cohesion between people, whose activities are involved by
the new IS developments, but also to design the IS itself. Ontology for IS contains
all these invariants, in particular knowledge but also some business rules, roles of
persons, which are independent of the IS development. For example, in the domain
of e-Government, the laws belong to this kind of ontology [ 18] . Ontology will play
the same role for IS as the keel for a boat.
In the future, these invariants can change and these changes are often independent
of the IS. But the IS must take into account them. For instance, laws can be modified
and therefore, the IS for e-government, built upon these lows, must also be modified.
Then, it is important to have the trace of these laws in the various IS parts to assure
IS evolution.
The important question is to choose the meta-model of ontology: it must be
interoperable with the conceptual meta-model and so the results of ontology can
be transformed into conceptual models following a precise procedure to keep the
trace of the elements coming from ontology. In the domain of ontology, the differ-
ences between static part and dynamic part become blurred. This fact has a possible
impact of the IS conceptual meta-model itself because it opens the way to a new kind
of meta-model, which fully integrates static and dynamic aspects of the considered
domain [14, 16] .
3.5 IS Governance and Sustainable IS
With all these worlds composing the IS domain, and with all their meta-models, an
IS becomes a farandole of models. This farandole must be articulated around the
conceptual model and such a result can be achieved if the underlying meta-models
are interoperable at least with the conceptual meta-model. Therefore, one of the IS