Essential Meta Model - Consolidated viewpoint

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xplorer4us
Posts: 6
Joined: 30 Sep 2012, 21:24

Hi,

would it be possible to publish a high level view of the Essential EA meta-model, which presents the core entities (for business, application, technology or EA support) and their associated relationships?

The meta-model section presents each individual domain and having a viewpoint which brings all of them together will be very useful.

Thanks,
Explorer
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neil.walsh
Posts: 444
Joined: 16 Feb 2009, 13:45
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Hi,

Sorry but we don't have anything like this available right now.

You could probably put something like this together yourself based on our current meta-model documentation.

Also, any high-level meta-model would probably be misleading for newcomers. Much of the strength of Essential lies in its rich and well-defined meta-model.

Thanks

Neil
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

The UML Backend plugin for Protege works well to create an XMI file containing all the classes and relationships ready to be used in your favourite UML tool. Then you just create a new diagram and drag the relevant classes onto the diagram and all the relationships appear automatically.

Now that there are over 500 meta classes in the Essential Meta Model it is really difficult to produce - and more importantly to read! - a single diagram of everything.

More details about the Protege plugin can be found in this post

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
xplorer4us
Posts: 6
Joined: 30 Sep 2012, 21:24

Thanks to all of you, this is very helpful. I did export the Essential Meta-model into an OWL and then import it back in Sparx, to select and visualize OWL classes, but the relationships and attributes did not seem to be preserved too well during these transformations.

I'll certainly give the UML Backend plugin a try :)

Indeed, gathering all 500 classes in a single view is not realistic, but I am only looking to extract the relevant concepts (to show the Essential' model richness compared to a Togaf meta-model, let's say, for those that are already familiar with EA landscape).

BTW, Essential meta-model is a great achievement, especially through it's rich semantics and coverage of the EA space, and I am using it frequently for most of my EA analysis work :D

Thanks again,
Explorer
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Thanks very much! Great to hear that you are finding it valuable and we'll keep on adding to it.

I agree totally about selecting the relevant aspects of the model and we had a similar challenge when creating models for our training courses and the screenshots in the meta model documentation on this site. It does require a degree of understanding to choose the 'right' classes to show on the diagram but we found that exporting to XMI and then dragging the classes onto diagrams within a UML tool worked pretty well.

Very interesting to hear about the route via OWL that you tried. In particular that you found some things didn't really make it into OWL correctly. A couple of us were just discussing the Frames vs OWL thing earlier today and what you describe seems to correlate to what a paper from the Protege team was saying. :)

Sparx should be able to import the resulting XMI document and hopefully you'll be able to quickly get the diagrams that you need. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the richness of the Essential Meta Model compared to TOGAF.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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