Characterization of a Taxonomy for Business Applications and the Relationships among them

In this paper we propose a taxonomy for classifying COTS business applications, i.e. products that are used in the daily functioning of all types of organizations worldwide, such as ERP systems and document management tools. We propose the identification of characterization attributes to arrange the domains which these products belong to, and also we group these domains into categories. We define questions and answers as a means for browsing the taxonomy during COTS selection. We show the need of identifying and recording the relationships among the domains and propose the use of actor-oriented models for expressing these relationships as dependencies. Last, we explore the definition of quality models for the domains, to be used in COTS selection, focusing on their reusability and stepwise definition downwards the hierarchy.