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Towards Orthographic Viewpoints for Enterprise Architecture Modeling
Abstract
One of the most important features of enterprise architecture modeling approaches is the set of views and viewpoints they use to convey the properties of enterprise systems - that is, their viewpoint framework. All mainstream approaches such as Zachman, RM-ODP, TOGAF and Archimate use the notion of independent 'concerns' or dimensions to organize their views and viewpoints, but often do so in ways that are inconsistent and overly complex. In this paper we compare the viewpoint framework of one well known Enterprise Architecture Modeling approach, Archimate, to the Orthographic Modeling approach which was developed to apply the idea of dimension-based view identification and selection in a pure, comprehensive form. After identifying weakness in Archimate's viewpoint framework from an orthographic modeling perspective we suggest how the former can be realized by, and adapted for, the latter.
... In Enterprise Architecture research has shown how business strategies are linked with data, processes, technology and people [3]. Therefore, nowadays, data analysis has become basic for knowledge discovery from the data collected from various sources. ...
New enterprises face several challenges in keeping their customers and keeping up with the dynamic growth of services and products. On the other hand, enterprises are generating Petabytes of data and managers don't know how to use this invaluable data. Some big enterprises are growing quickly because of the right use of information as a key factor in their decision-making and market intelligence. Business is developing rapidly and in unpredictably. The rapid evolution of the Internet is opening up opportunities to create new kinds of business like e-business, smart factories, and virtual enterprises (VE). In this context, based on Enterprise Architecture (EA), VE, and synergy in business integration, we propose to develop a research framework, which details the formal process to achieve a fluid business synergy in business collaboration processes. The proposal consists of a conceptual model with three factors: EA, VE, and Synergy in Business Integration and Collaboration (BIC).
Companies are increasingly conscious of the importance of Enterprise Architecture (EA) to represent and manage IT and business in a holistic way. EA modelling has become decisive to achieve models that accurately represents behaviour and assets of companies and lead them to make appropriate business decisions. Although EA representations can be manually modelled by experts, automatic EA modelling methods have been proposed to deal with drawbacks of manual modelling, such as error-proneness, time-consumption, slow and poor re-adaptation, and cost. However, automatic modelling is not effective for the most abstract concepts in EA like strategy or motivational aspects. Thus, companies are demanding hybrid approaches that combines automatic with manual modelling. In this context there are no clear relationships between the input artefacts (and mining techniques) and the target EA viewpoints to be automatically modelled, as well as relationships between the experts’ roles and the viewpoints to which they might contribute in manual modelling. Consequently, companies cannot make informed decisions regarding expert assignments in EA modelling projects, nor can they choose appropriate mining techniques and their respective input artefacts. This research proposes a decision support system whose core is a genetic algorithm. The proposal first establishes (based on a previous literature review) the mentioned missing relationships and EA model specifications. Such information is then employed using a genetic algorithm to decide about automatic, manual or hybrid modelling by selecting the most appropriate input artefacts, mining techniques and experts. The genetic algorithm has been optimized so that the system aids EA architects to maximize the accurateness and completeness of EA models while cost (derived from expert assignments and unnecessary automatic generations) are kept under control.
Most view-based modeling approaches are today based on a “synthetic” approach in which the views hold all the information modeled about a system and are kept consistent using explicit, inter-view correspondence rules. The alternative “projective” approach, in which the contents of views are “projected” from a single underlying model on demand, is far less widely used due to the lack of suitable conceptual frameworks and languages. In this paper we take a step towards addressing this problem by presenting the foundations of a suitable language and conceptual framework for defining and applying views for projective modeling. The framework leverages deep modeling in order to seamlessly support views that exist at, and span, multiple levels of classification. The viewpoint language was developed in the context of Orthographic Software Modeling but is more generally applicable to any projective modeling approach.
Although there is growing consensus on the need to move to comprehensive, view-based approaches to software engineering, there is much less consensus on what views and viewpoints should be used to do this and what relationship they should have to the system being viewed. One approach that aims to provide a simple yet powerful approach to view-based software engineering is the orthographic modeling approach inspired by the orthographic projection technique used in CAD systems. However, the criteria that a set of views and viewpoints should fulfill to be regarded as orthographic have never been clearly defined. Nor have the criteria that a set of dimensions should fulfill in order to be regarded as orthogonal. In this paper we aim to take some initial steps towards defining such criteria. After first identifying some of the main weaknesses in existing view-based modeling approaches we provide an overview of orthographic modeling and clarify some of the principles that underpin it.
Although they are significantly different in how they decompose and conceptualize software systems, one thing that all advanced
software engineering paradigms have in common is that they increase the number of different views involved in visualizing
a system. Managing these different views can be challenging even when a paradigm is used independently, but when they are
used together the number of views and inter-dependencies quickly becomes overwhelming. In this paper we present a novel approach
for organizing and generating the different views used in advanced software engineering methods that we call Orthographic
Software Modeling (OSM). This provides a simple metaphor for integrating different development paradigms and for leveraging
domain specific languages in software engineering. Development environments that support OSM essentially raise the level of
abstraction at which developers interact with their tools by hiding the idiosyncrasies of specific editors, storage choices
and artifact organization policies. The overall benefit is to significantly simplify the use of advanced software engineering
methods.
As the size and complexity of services has grown over the years, so has the number of different models and view types used to visualize them. However, in most development environments used today, views are usually organized in a fairly simple way within an arrangement of trees, and are often mixed arbitrarily with the artifacts they contain or visualize. In this position paper we propose a new paradigm for creating, organizing and managing the different views that are required in modern software development projects inspired by the orthographic projection paradigm that has been used for many years in other engineering disciplines. The approach therefore makes software engineering environments more like computer-aided design (CAD) tools for physical products. After explaining the basic idea behind the approach, which we refer to as Orthographic Service Modeling (OSM), we outline its three key ingredients - (1) on- demand view generation, (2) dimension-based navigation (3) and an inherently view-based method.
In current business practice, an integrated approach to busi- ness and IT is indispensable. In many enterprises, however, such an in- tegrated view of the entire enterprise is still far from reality. To deal with these challenges, an integrated view of the enterprise is needed, enabling impact and change analysis covering all relevant aspects. This need sparked the development of the ArchiMate language, which was de- veloped with the explicit intention of becoming an open standard, and as such has been designed such that it is extendable while still maintaining a clear and orthogonal structure. This paper is concerned with document- ing some of the key design decisions and design principles underlying the ArchiMate language.
Orthographic Software Modeling (OSM) is a view-centric software engineering approach that aims to leverage the orthographic projection metaphor used in the visualization of physical objects to visualize software systems. Although the general concept of OSM does not prescribe specific sets of views, a concrete OSM environment has to be specific about the particular views to be used in a particular project. At the University of Mannheim we are developing a prototype OSM environment, nAOMi, that supports the views defined by the KobrA 2.0 method, a version of KobrA adapted for OSM. In this paper we provide an overview of the KobrA 2.0 metamodel underpinning nAOMi and give a small example of its use to model a software system.
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