An Ontological Approach to Sophisticating Legacy Business Content

Legacy Information Systems (LIS) pose a challenging problem for business organisations. On one hand, LIS are viewed as aging systems needing replacement; on the other hand, they are a valuable source of corporate knowledge and their mission-critical status makes them increasingly indispensable. Although these challenges have persisted for some time, practical solutions are only now starting to emerge via the concept of legacy renovation. Current approaches are often criticised for being overtly dependent on technology and ignoring the business ‘content’ and its semantics, which reside within LIS. In this light, this paper proposes a means of capturing the business content in a technology agnostic manner and transforming it in a way that reaps the benefits of clear semantic expression – this transformation is achieved via the careful use of ontology. The main objective of the recovery process is to provide a model of the business that more closely adheres to the semantics and relationships of things existing in the real world. The benefits of such an approach are illustrated via an example taken from a case study concerning the renovation of a large financial system. The overall outcomes of the approach result in technology agnostic models that show improvements along several dimensions.