Hi Andreas, Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. I take your point about how some integrations do not appear to do very much, e.g. simple ETLs. However, even these simple integrations are automating the process of moving information from one system to another and in doing so encapsulate t...

Hi Ulf,

We're not quite there with these extensions yet but will let you know when we have it ready to share.
I'll go into proper detail when we've tested it properly, rather than explain it and then find some problems, etc.

Jonathan

I've started ECP-6 to produce the required extensions to the Service_Delivery and Support Model meta classes and have captured some requirements for what the extension needs to be able to do. If you have any additional requirements, please post them as replies to the ECP-6 topic. ECP-6 Service Deliv...

I've kicked off ECP-7 to produce the required update to support this requirement and have captured some requirements in there. If you have any additional requirements, please post them as replies to the ECP-7 topic.

ECP-7 Business Objectives to Actor Relationships.

Thanks

Jonathan

ECP-7 will deliver an update to the core metal model to enable Business Objectives to be related to the Actors to which they apply. This will enable the objectives of any Actor in the extended enterprise to be managed - from an individual to a company. Indeed this update will enable any Objective in...

ECP-8 delivers an extension to the Service Delivery section of the EA Support classes of the Essential Meta Model. This extension must provide the capability to capture various support models for the provision of any service within the organisation, e.g. Application Providers. Rather than add additi...

Hi Mike, Apologies for taking so long to get back to you. You're right about not using the company name into the Business Objective name - putting semantics into the name of an instance in the model is using storing up trouble for later. We've been discussing how best to meet your requirements and w...

Hi John, Thanks for your post and apologies for taking so long to get back to you. We've done this sort of thing before - using classes in the Service_Delivery part of the EA_Support classes. At the moment, these just contain some abstract classes - the idea was to implement specific classes to mode...

Hi Mike, Thanks for your post. This is an interesting one that we've been talking about today. I think we need to explore it further but I wanted to get back to as soon as possible. Jason (a member of the Essential Project team) has actually been working on an approach and tutorial for how services ...

Just a quick post to let you know that the new release of Essential Viewer is now available.
This release fixes the bug that you found (and also in all the other catalogues).

Find out more about this release in this latest update article.

Thanks again for reporting this bug.

Jonathan

If you've used Essential (you only mention Protege) you might want to take a look at Clint Cooper's Visio export tools . I was working with a couple of the development leads from Orbus Software the other day and as I understand it, iServer's strength is its ability to manage things like Microsoft Of...

I've fixed the scenario that I described above. To test it, I gave an Application Service a name with the " ' " in it. With the current release of the software, this appears in the catalogue but the link to the details of the Application Service does not work. I've changed the way the link...

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. I've just tried this and can you confirm that the Catalogue is being displayed properly but that the hyperlink to the Application Service details is not working? [This is the behaviour that I'm seeing] It is to do with how the link to the Application S...

Leaving out the sequence information should not cause any problems with the current set of out-of-the-box views. However, if you have that information available in the source model, then - as with any types of architectural information - it's always good to have it in the Essential repository if you...

I've just completed a modification to the ReportingService and the Essential Viewer that's at the 'essential_viewer/reportService' URL so that attempts to access this service via a browser report that this is not the correct URL and provides a link to the correct URL (so that you can update any book...

Just had another thought. When trying to access the Essential Viewer, you are using the following URL: http://localhost:8080/essential_viewer aren't you? It's worth noting that the URL that appears in the Essential Architecture Reporting tab in Protege is a special URL that is used to send the repos...

Hi Peter, Not sure what Piet did to resolve this. Can you tell me about your installation and hopefully we can resolve this quickly? Specifically: - What version of Tomcat are you running? - What version of Protege are you running? - What versions of Essential Architecture Manager are you using? You...

Hello Ulf The 'contained physical sub processes' slot on Physical Process is actually going to be deprecated in the meta model and will no longer be available in future releases of the baseline Essential Meta Model. The flow and use of sub-processes for Physical Processes is defined by the logical B...

No worries.

What was the issue in that caused this?

Thanks

Regards

Jonathan

This isn't really the correct forum for this post. Please use the 'Essential Software Platform' forum for problems with the Essential Architecture Manager software. To answer your query (with another question!), have you installed all the pre-requisites before installing Essential Architecture Manag...

ECP-6 will produce viewpoints to support Strategy Management processes, providing analysis reports and viewpoints from the instances of the meta classes in the Strategy Management section of the meta model. This ECP is related to ECP-4 (strategy management meta classes). Requirements Initial require...

You can export the entire Protege ontology as UML 1.4 and then use your favourite UML tool to browse/share the meta model as UML. The UML Backend plugin for Protege works well. This has no user interface as such, rather you open your in Protege and then select File->Export and select UML 1.4. The pl...

That screenshot looks correct now - with the Essential Architecture Reporting tab showing, the widgets must have installed correctly. Glad you have got the Essential Viewer deployed into Tomcat. I should have mentioned that occasionally Tomcat doesn't seem to recognise a newly deployed WAR file and ...

Normally, it's best to browse to the Tomcat root folder to make sure it finds everything OK. So that path should read something like: c:\Apache Software Foundation\tomcat 5.5 Sounds like the installer might not have found the webapps folder to drop 'essential_viewer.war' into. On the widgets side, I...

Thanks for the update - that makes things a bit clearer. When you installed the Essential Viewer, did the installer find your Tomcat installation, or did you have to navigate to it? It will look in typical locations for the Tomcat install. You can check whether it has been deployed by looking in <To...

As long as the Protege server is happy to continue to run, you should be OK with that error message. It looks to me like trouble with the installer. When you download it, you should get a file called essentialinstall.jar (NOTE: not essentialinstall.zip). Once you've made sure that you have Java inst...

Just to be clear, Essential Viewer is a web application that is deployed to your Tomcat installation. This is accessed by a web browser, typically with a URL like (in a stand-alone installation): http://localhost:8080/essential_viewer or for a multi-user install: http://<your server>:8080/essential_...

Thanks for your post. Yes, this is possible and we're currently working on an extension to the Information Layer that adds more details around the Data Subjects and Entities that are used to 'produce' information. This should be ready very soon and will provide Viewpoints that show the source to tar...

Hi Michael, This is something that I spent quite some time working with an organisation doing. We built some synchronised integrations with their CMDB to bring in new hardware as it was discovered and over time Essential became the most accurate view of their physical landscape - in terms of the ser...

You're right. In the Dynamic Application Architecture - which describes what happens when a function is executed - you model those events that initiate things and those events that are raised by the function. Rather than capture the whole end-to-end flow (one of potentially many in an event-based mo...

Hi Michael, This is a 'feature' of Protege when it's working against a database and is all to do with how the repository is managed in the database. I've seen this myself and agree that it's not ideal. There was some discussion about this recently on the Protege mailing list, to which the Protege te...

Hi Nathan, The first thing to note is that we associate System Events with Applications, and a System Event is interpreted as a Business Event by systems. e.g. "Customer Contact" could happen via telephone or via email. So, to link the applications by a Business Event, you need to create a...

Users are controlled by the 'metaproject' that controls the Protege server. The administration documentation about configuring the metaproject describes how to add new users. When you make any changes to the metaproject: First stop the Protege Server Open the metaproject using the normal Protege cli...

Hi Hasko From what you've described, I would agree that a Composite Application Service is the best way to capture this. This is just the sort of thing the composites were defined for.   It's down to a design/modelling decision (of your composite) as to whether or not your composite exposes all of t...

Hi Hasko Just a quick note to let you know that I've released an update to the Essential Viewer views for the Application Service that resolves the issues that you raised. The update makes sure that Composite Application Services are listed in the catalogue (as well as Services with names that start...

Just to let you know that I've uploaded the revised installer that will now auto-detect Protege 3.4.4 installations.

Jonathan

Hi Hasko, I've just had a look at the Application Service Catalogue view and there is indeed a sort of bug and an actual bug. :shock: The actual bug with this is that if you happen to name your Application Service with a lower case first letter, e.g. myService instead of MyService, then it will not ...

Hi Paul, Thanks for your post.  I've just had a look at this on my Mac and have some suggestions.  Firstly, I will update the installer so that it also tries to Auto Detect the latest versions of Protege. The installer didn't detect my Protege 3.4.4 but should pick up 3.4 - 3.4.3 However, this wasn'...

Sure - looking forward to hearing how you are getting on.

Feel free to start new topics so others can see the issues and learn from what we post.

Thanks

Jonathan

Just a quick post to let you know that a new meta model update that includes this fix is now available in the Community/Share area to download and apply.

Jonathan

Just a quick post to let you know that a new meta model update that includes this fix is now available in the Community/Share area to download and apply.

Jonathan

Hi Michael - Happy New Year! Yes, you can convert the repository to use a database at any point. I have run for several months on file based (again due to an issue with using MS SQL Server) and converted to use MySQL later on. To do the conversion, make sure to stop the server. Then, on your server ...

Hi David, Great to hear that you got the install to work. The only "Essential" folder that you should expect to see is the folder in which the empty, baseline repository is installed. The main components of Essential Architecture Manager are the widgets - which are plugins for Protege - an...

Hi Michael, Thanks for your post and sorry to hear that you've lost some data.  I have some questions to help clarify your configuration.  1 - are you still using a file based repository for the server rather than the MySQL database? If so, there's a config parameter called 'saveInterval' that needs...

Hi Gary, Great to hear about how you're using Essential. All sounds good. On the inconsistency you mention between those 2 reports, they are providing two different perspectives on how Business Capabilities - WHAT the business does / needs to do, not how. The Business Capabilities implemented by bus...

Hi Gary, Apologies for taking so long to get back to you. You're right, the purpose of the Application class is really just to group Application Providers that are know by some sort of collective name. For example, I've used this to group different Application Providers that are functional variation...

Just a quick post to let you know that we've just released the Essential Integration Tab which replaces the Integration Server. It uses an evolution of the components of the integration server but provides it all in a much easier-to-use package.

Download it from the Community/Share area.

Jonathan

Thanks for posting back. Yes, this is the correct order for the installation. However, note that you should complete the install of all 4 components before proceeding with Section 12. I think it would be worth checking that Protege is installed properly before tackling this section by running it in ...

Yes, it will. On your server installation of Protege, you run the Protege Server by using the "run_protege_server.bat" program. There is documentation on Protege's and our site about how to make this start as a Windows service. Each user also has an installation of Protege and when they st...

Hi Andre, Thanks very much for your post. The way we model a new version of an Application Provider is to create a new instance of an Application Provider meta class and name it accordingly. E.g. I have an application provider, called 'MyApp', then I create a new Application Provider, 'MyApp version...

Thanks for sending these details. The first point to note is that Essential Architecture Manager does not support Protege 4.x. If you are installing Protege as part of an install of Essential Architecture Manager, please download the latest version of Protege 3 (currently 3.4.2). Apologies, I've jus...

Thanks for your post. Can you tell me more about the version of Protege that you are trying to install (e.g. version 3.4.1 or 3.4.2) and the platform on which you are trying to install it, e.g. Windows XP, Vista, Mac etc.? Is the Protege installer running to completion or are you encountering any er...

Just a quick update on the progress of ECP-4. Although this topic has been quiet for a little while, we are currently road-testing this in a real-world application. ECP-4 will move to the release status of the ECP process once this is complete. The current release can be used in the meantime as we a...

Could it be an authentication issue? The installer is setup to run in a privileged mode for Windows Vista. Is it worth trying to install the repository files in an alternative location, e.g. C:\EssentialAM or something else outside 'Program Files'? Everything should still run correctly no matter whe...

The installation deploys things to a number of folders. The Protege plugins folder, that you will find in C:\Program Files\Protege_3.4.1 The Tomcat webapps folder, that you will find in C:\Program Files\apache-tomcat-<version X> The baseline, empty repository for Essential Architecture Manager, whic...

I've just been reminded of a useful rule to use when defining the static application architecture. If you're defining the static application architecture of Application Provider 'A', only define the dependencies FROM 'A' to other applications. Dependencies TO 'A' will be captured in the static appli...

Thanks for your post. When we designed the Essential Meta Model, we realised that Integrations are a class of applications that usually do not have any user interaction. They still have behaviour (which is what applications are about) but rather than working with user interfaces, they have system in...

This is an inconsistency. The rationale should be on the Principle, not the Objective.
I will create a patch update to resolve this.
Thanks very much for pointing this out.

Jonathan

I'll take a close look at that and get back to you. Could well be an inconsistency that we need to resolve.

Thanks for raising this

Jonathan

Just a quick one to let you know that the Meta Model Update pack for ECP-5 is now available for download. This update will apply all of the changes to implement the ECP-5 sample repository in your Essential Repository. Download the ECP-5 Business Skill Pack from the Share area. I'd advise making a q...

I've uploaded the new version of the ECP-5 meta model sample repository for testing and approval. This now includes the Skill Relationship classes so that we can capture qualities on the relationship to Skills, e.g. Skill Level. Have a look at the 'J Jones' and the 'London IT Support Team' Actor ins...

Hi Michael, Thanks very much for the feedback. Excellent stuff. You are absolutely right about the issue of where to draw the boundary being balanced against what you need to be able to understand. In this particular case, it could be that setting up some sort of synchronisation with the relevant in...

Thanks for this. I've been looking into this a bit more and the plugins implementation is very different in Protege 4, using the OGSI framework which is where those errors are coming from. Also, it seems a number of key features, such as Frames support, multi-user support and storing the repository ...

We don't support Protege 4, sorry. In terms of reverting to Protege 3, I'd recommend going for Protege 3.4.1 - the latest version of Protege that supports Frames and which has a number of good bug fixes and improvements over 3.3.1. As a bit of background, that's the issue (at the moment) with Proteg...

Good points, Sarah. The key point is if we think we'll need to add qualities to the relationships to Skills, then we should do this now. But, to keep things as easy-to-use as possible, we should be confident about the potential for that requirement rather than adding it just in case we might need it...

Thanks very much for your feedback, Peter. I agree.

I've added some notes next to the download links for both the installer and the update installer that suggest that IE users make sure that the file is saved as a '.jar' if IE tries to make it a '.ZIP'

Jonathan

That makes sense. We would create a relationship class that we can use between Actors and Skills and also between Roles and Skills. On this class we can capture properties such as the skill level (another enumeration, I think) and perhaps other things to do with things like their experience. I'll ha...

Hi Michael, Thanks for posting back and confirming the requirement. I've tweaked what you suggest a little and clarified some of the relationships between things like Process and Capability in the following class diagram. I've gone back to Skill Type as I feel that what we're trying to do here is sa...

The update for this is now available on the Downloads page.
Download the Update Installer (essentialupdate.jar) and run it to upgrade your Widgets and Viewer

Jonathan

Thanks very much, everyone, for your feedback. I've spent quite a bit of time today looking at what we can do and it seems that this is an issue with all versions of Internet Explorer (I've tried it with IE8 on Windows 7 to get the latest and greatest versions). I have added a MIME type statement to...

Just a quick note to let you know that this feature has now been completed. Any graphically-defined instance in the modeller (e.g. process flow, application architecture) now has an snapshot image of the graphical diagram exported to the Viewer. These diagrams are included in the relevant reports. I...

Very strange. Glad you have the JAR now. Could it be that something like WinRAR or equivalent archiver tool is installed on your Windows machine and interfering with what happens when you try to execute the JAR? With recent Java installations, that JAR should be executable - just by double-clicking ...

Requirements I have a situation where I'd like to capture information related to the specific skills an Actor has associated with them (personally). e.g. John Smith has skills with Java 1.6 SE. When I look at the Business metamodel at the conceptual level, Business Capabilities are defined and then...

Thanks very much for this, Michael. Very interesting - and certainly makes sense to be captured in the model. I agree that trying to use Business Capability for this is stretching the semantics of that meta class too much. It's very important that each class has clear semantics. The Capabilities are...

ECP-5 will develop the requirements and meta model extensions to support the ability to capture and model Skills required by Business Roles and provided by Actors in the business layer.

Thanks for your post. I've checked the site and it definitely links to 'essentialinstall.jar'. In fact, there is no 'essentialinstall.zip' to download. Could you tell me which operating system platform you are using? Is it possible that something is processing the downloaded JAR file once it has bee...

Hi Sean, That is strange that I can't get the XMLTab to behave in the same way - I kept wondering if I was missing something. One thing worth checking is the version of Protege that you're using. It's worth moving to Protege 3.4.1 if you can as this has a few bug fixes. However, I've just tested wit...

I've posted some examples in the Share Area . The main principle of the XSL is that rather than transform the source to an XML target, the XSL generates a Python import script, using a set of helper functions that we have developed to manage the update/creation and synchronisation of instances as ap...

Hi Eric, The problem here is that in the reportXML.xml format, the <name> tag is the instance ID, e.g. test_class233, not the actual name, Wireshark.org. The schema of the <simple_instance> tag is roughly: <simple_instance> <name>The INSTANCE ID - Protege's internal name for the instance</name> <typ...

Just a quick update to let you know that we are now in the process of implementing the feature to have images from the modeller (e.g. business process, technology architectures) exported to the Essential Viewer.

This will be an update to the Essential Widgets and the Essential Viewer

Jonathan

Hi Eric, Thanks for your post. Yes, there are classes to capture how information is exchanged between application things. I'm going to set out some options for how to do this, depending on what you are actually trying to capture. 1. Application Service / Application Provider Dynamic Architectures Fo...

Hi Sean, I've just had a go at replicating what you describe. The "instances" field is actually a field to specify the output XML file for the selected Class, although I found that dragging a class over there put the name of the class in that field. However, my class stayed put in the clas...

Hi Sathish,

Sorry, no news on this yet.

However, if you haven't already, you might like to take a look at the Visio export component that Clint Cooper has developed.

Jonathan

Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. The PPRJ file is the project file that defines everything about how the project is configured and stored. When you convert a file-based repository to use a database "backend", the configuration of the classes (the meta model) and the instance...

Looking at this warning: WARNING: Could not connect to remote project Regulatory Activities Inventory Rep ository -- java.lang.RuntimeException: java.rmi.UnmarshalException: error unmars halling return; nested exception is: java.io.InvalidClassException: edu.stanford.smi.protege.server.update.Va lue...

Hi Guilllaume, Thanks for this post. Out-of-the-box, Protege is still as you describe, except that in the latest version, 3.4.1, the access control has been implemented properly, so you can control who can access, read or write to a project. For something like an Enterprise Architecture repository, ...

Great news. I'm really pleased to hear that you've got it all running. No problem at all helping out, any time. I'm working on some installers at the moment to make it much easier to get going with the Essential tools. However, the multi-user setup is always more complex - most of what we've been lo...

I've gone through the Protege source code related to the stack trace you've posted. Looks like there's an Operation in the metaproject that hasn't got it's name defined properly - possibly with no name. If you have still got the default metaproject.pprj, metaproject.pins and metaproject.pont files t...

Hi Magnus, I've had a very good reply from the Protege team about the DB2 issue. The first point they make is that, actually, DB2 is not supported BUT you can custom-configure Protege to work with DB2, via some rarely used protege properties. These are set using the Protege properties panel which yo...

Looks like the server is starting properly and that you have 2 projects defined in the metaproject, each with an annotations project. If nothing is appearing when you log in, it sounds like your user has not been given access rights to any of your projects. Check the set up of your metaproject and m...

Great to hear that you've solved that one. I think you'll be OK with those error messages - the RMIRegistry just won't be able to log. I have to say I haven't seen that before. Thanks for posting the resolution - as you say, it will be of great help to others who might encounter this. Keep me posted...

Just Googled RMIRegistry and Windows 2000. One more thing to try. It could be that somehow a process has got hold of port 1099 (reserved for RMIRegistry). We can check for this by stopping the Protege Server and the RMIRegistry and then from a command line, trying to run the RMIRegistry by hand and ...

This looks tricky but what we're seeing is the Protege server being refused a connection to the RMIRegistry. As a bit of background, the RMIRegistry acts as a naming service to enable clients to connect to the server. However, before they can do that, the server must register itself with the RMIRegi...

Glad to hear that you have got your project converted to the database. It may well be that Protege 3.4.1 hasn't been fully tested with older versions of MySQL or that using the v5.1 driver with the v5.0 and v4 database is causing trouble. I'm using MySQL 5.0.5 and driver 5.0.4 just for reference. OK...

As described above, to move ECP-4 forward, rather than post a UML description of the meta model extensions, I've created a sample repository based on the Essential Sample Repository, with all the latest ECP updates applied. Note that these updates will not be pre-requisites for using the Strategy Ma...

OK, I've just tested it successfully with Protege 3.4.1 and MySQL 5. I've just converted the ECP-4 file-based repository (which I will publish later on in that ECP) to use a database backend and all went smoothly. Interestingly, it seems that the new database persistence in Protege uses different ty...

I think you're right, there could be an inconsistency between using the v5 JDBC driver against the v4 MySQL. Is there a v4 JDBC driver? I see you've tried v3 and v5. You're right, we haven't specified a MySQL version. We've been using v5 for the last 2+ years and haven't tried older versions. If it ...

Thanks for your post. Can you confirm which version of MySQL, the JDBC driver, Protege and OS that you are using? We've not had any problems reported with MySQL on Windows, Mac and Linux, and I'm pretty sure that MySQL is the main DB that the Protege team test with. However, this seems to be similar...

Thanks.

I've already raised a request for some feedback on the use of DB2. This will help a lot.

Let me know how you get on with the drivers and I'll keep you posted on what I can find out about this exception

Jonathan

I think our posts crossed in the ether! Here is the source - BUT as I say, the Protege code drops any existing table before creating a new one to store your repository. You can create the table, but Protege will zap it before trying to create it again. As you show - Protege is creating the maximum v...