Dependency of the Manager on the Metamodel

Post Reply
bdubois
Posts: 2
Joined: 22 Sep 2010, 20:26

Hi,

As a newcomer to this forum, I'd like to thank the community for their effort in sharing their work! Many thanks!

The documentation states that "Essential Architecture Manager is the reference implementation of the Essential Architecture Meta Model".

This makes me wonder to which extent the Essential Architecture Manager is dependent upon the metamodel, i.e., to which extent can the metamodel be customised without requiring changes to the Essential Architecture Manager.

The scenario I am thinking about is to model the Archimate/TOGAF metamodel in Protégé, while reusing functionality from the Essential Architecture Manager for reporting and analysis...

Kind regards,
Bart.
User avatar
jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Hi Bart,

Essential Architecture Manager is the reference implementation of the Essential Meta Model because we have implemented previous versions of it in various commercial modelling tools.

Aside from providing a useful toolkit for architects, one of the intentions of Essential Architecture Manager is to demonstrate the power of the Essential Meta Model when combined with a knowledge-base approach and tools for producing analysis views.

In this sense, Essential Architecture Manager depends on the Essential Meta Model. However, note that the meta model has been designed to be highly and rapidly extensible - and the tools that make up Essential Architecture Manager (including the Protege Ontology tool) make this a reality. We recommend that people extend - that is add new attributes or meta classes - the Essential Meta Model rather than customise it so that they can still take advantage of the out-of-the-box and forthcoming Views and future updates to the meta model.

The main software components of your scenario would work but you would be responsible for creating your own views, as those that we provide as a starter to the toolkit expect the Essential Meta Model to have been used.
However, we have designed Essential to be framework in dependent. Our approach to supporting TOGAF and ArchiMate is define a mapping between the meta models and produce views that use the terminology of TOGAF. The Essential Viewer fits the Views and Viewpoints approach of TOGAF very nicely, where the required views are generated from the knowledge base managed by Protege.
It is important to point out that most, if not all, of the key concepts of Archimate are easily mapped to meta classes in Essential. However, in Essential we are not modelling in the traditional sense. Rather, we are defining a knowledge base (or ontology) about our enterprise, so many of the meta classes are oriented towards accurately capturing the knowledge about how your organisation works. That is, they are things about the way the/your world is rather than what an architectural model should be made of - and these necessarily go down to a lot of detail.

It's this knowledge base that is the basis for the powerful analysis - which is inferred and derived from the knowledge base - that is produced by the views.

For this reason, we're confident about presenting - via the views in Essential Viewer - using ArchiMate, TOGAF, any other framework's terms - but we don't provide ArchiMate/TOGAF/etc. "versions" of the Essential Meta Model or in Protege.

I'm pretty sure that you will find many of the terms familiar in Essential Meta Model but please do let us know if there are some concepts that you need and that we haven't got in there yet. Please also feel free to post here with any queries about mapping the meta model onto ArchiMate etc.

I've included a fair bit of background here rather than going for a direct answer. Hope this helps.

Regards

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
bdubois
Posts: 2
Joined: 22 Sep 2010, 20:26

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for your extensive reply.

Indeed, I didn't expect any issues concerning the addition of attributes/elements.

I haven't compared the metamodel with Archimate/TOGAF Core Content Metamodel in detail yet, but it indeed seems to be sufficiently expressive. I hope to get back soon with such a comparison...

Kind regards,
Bart.
User avatar
jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Hi Bart,

We'd be very interested to hear the results of your comparison.

Thanks

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
Post Reply