Enterprise Architecture Languages

title

Enterprise Architecture Languages

author

Bernard Szlachta (bs@NobleProg.co.uk)

Enterprise Architecture Languages⌘

• There is no de-facto language describing Enterprise Architecture in general
• Most languages are domain specific or universal (not specifically covering EA)

UML⌘

• Description separately

SoaML⌘

see SoaML materials

Category:SoaML

IDEF⌘

• Integration DEFinition
• IDEF is a family of modelling languages
• Developed under funding from US Air Force
• Released into Public Domain
• Languages are pretty much separate
• Lhere is no mapping from one view (language) to the other

IDEF⌘

Some of the languages:

• IDEFIX: The core
• IDEF0 : Function Modelling[2]

IDEF⌘

• IDEF1 : Information Modelling
• IDEF1X : Data Modelling

IDEF⌘

• IDEF2 : Simulation Model Design
• IDEF3 : Process Description Capture

IDEF⌘

• IDEF4 : Object-Oriented Design
• IDEF5 : Ontology Description Capture

IDEF⌘

• IDEF6 : Design Rationale Capture

• IDEF7 : Information System Auditing
• IDEF8 : User Interface Modeling
• IDEF9 : Business Constraint Discovery
• IDEF10 : Implementation Architecture Modeling
• IDEF11 : Information Artifact Modeling
• IDEF12 : Organization Modeling
• IDEF13 : Three Schema Mapping Design
• IDEF14 : Network Design

BPMN⌘

TODO

ARIS⌘

• ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems)
• An approach to enterprise modeling
• It is not a standard
• Offers holistic view of process design, management, work flow, and application processing
• Provides a generic and well-documented methodological framework
• Uses EPC (Event-driven Process Chain)
• Supported by ARIS Toolset (by Software AG)
• ARIS is not extensible
• ARIS is not actively maintained

ArchiMate⌘

• The Open Group Standard
• It is not really as open as The Open Group says
• ArchiMate® 2.0 is aligned with TOGAF®

Architecture Description Languages ⌘

• ADL term is used in many engineering communities
• There is no de-facto standard for Architecture Description Language (ADL)
• In the software engineering community, an ADL relates to software architectures
• Most of ADLs have academic background (CMU)

Some Examples of ADL:

• Acme (CMU)
• AADL (standardized by SAE, Latest version 2009-01-20)
• C2 (developed by UCI)
• Darwin (developed by Imperial College London)
• Wright (developed by CMU)

SoaML ⌘

• OMG Standard based on UML (2012)
• Described in details lateron

Suitability for EA⌘

Languages suitable for describing EA should:

• Define relationship (integration) between domains (views)
• Clear semantics
• Cover both, the business and the technology with clear relationship between them

• UML seems to be able to describe it clearly, but its semantics is too general
• There are a lot of profiles for UML which make the UML specific enough to describe EA in an unambiguous way
• Most of the frameworks use UML profiles or Meta-models based on UML