Ontological Evaluation of the Requirements Model in IS Re-engineering

The vast majority of present legacy information systems were implemented using the traditional paradigm that consists of modeling techniques used by system analysts such as System Flow Charts and Data Flow Diagrams (DFD) to capture, during the analysis phase, the activities within a system. However, with recent developments, particularly trends towards e-Commerce applications, platform independence, reusability of pre-built components, many organizations are realizing they will need to re-engineer their systems into new component based systems that meet these trends given the limitations of legacy systems to adapt to these new technical requirements. There is a high degree of interest and concern in establishing whether or not a full migration to a more portable and scalable component-based architecture will be able to represent the legacy business requirements in the underlying requirements model of the re-engineered information systems. As a result, this study poses the question: Is the resulting component-based requirements model ontological equivalent to the legacy requirements model when shifting paradigms in the re-engineering process?