The government defined the federal enterprise architecture reference model fea-rm

In contrast to an executable enterprise architecture, the value of cancer research is not usually contested. But this field also has requirements having to do with distribution of information and work. Each research team around the world has its own approach and methodology for pursuing its research. How can each team have the autonomy it needs to make its advances yet still participate in a worldwide community so that efforts from various teams can be used synergistically? The Semantic Web is about enabling the net-work effect in these efforts. The purpose of the models described here is to achieve an effective balance between federation (commonality) and autonomy (variability).

REFERENCE MODELS AND COMPOSABILITY

Toward this end, the U.S. government sponsored a project to cast the FEA-RM into OWL (FEARMO). The FEARMO project chose RDF as the data modeling lan-guage to support the composability that is required by a reference model. The reference model itself is represented as an RDF graph; each agency customi-zation is represented as a set of triples, which is merged with this graph. This ensures that each agency has a core structure (based on the FEA-RM) on which they all agree, but at the same time, each agency can add its own extra structure as it sees fit. For example, consider the fragment of the FEARMO shown in Figure 11-1.

Supply Chain Management

isComprisedOf

Sample business areas from the FEARMO.