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The Architecture of ArchiMate Language PDF

The document discusses the architecture and design principles of the ArchiMate language. It was developed to provide an integrated enterprise architecture modeling language that can represent different core aspects of an enterprise at a coarse-grained level. The language consists of six main components: a conceptual framework, an abstract syntax defined by a meta-model, modeling concepts for enterprise aspects, semantics defining the meaning of constructs, appearance rules for visualization, and exchange formats for model interchange. An example ArchiMate model is also provided to illustrate usage of the language.

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111 views2 pages

The Architecture of ArchiMate Language PDF

The document discusses the architecture and design principles of the ArchiMate language. It was developed to provide an integrated enterprise architecture modeling language that can represent different core aspects of an enterprise at a coarse-grained level. The language consists of six main components: a conceptual framework, an abstract syntax defined by a meta-model, modeling concepts for enterprise aspects, semantics defining the meaning of constructs, appearance rules for visualization, and exchange formats for model interchange. An example ArchiMate model is also provided to illustrate usage of the language.

Uploaded by

Matheus Oliveira
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The Architecture of the ArchiMate Language

M.M. Lankhorst1 , H.A. Proper2,3, and H. Jonkers4


1
Telematica Instituut, Enschede, The Netherlands
2
Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
3
Capgemini, Utrecht, The Netherlands
4
BiZZdesign, Enschede, The Netherlands

Abstract. 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. This paper is
concerned with documenting some of the key design decisions and design
principles underlying the ArchiMate language.

1 Introduction
In current business practice, an integrated approach to business and IT is in-
dispensable. In many enterprises, however, such an integrated view of the entire
enterprise is still far from reality. This is a major problem, since changes in an en-
terprise’s strategy and business goals have significant consequences within all do-
mains of the enterprise, including organisational structures, business processes,
software systems and technical infrastructure [1, 2]. To manage the complexity
of any large system, be it an enterprise, an information system or a software
system, an architectural approach is needed. To be able to represent the archi-
tecture of an enterprise, an architecture description language is needed allowing
for the represetation of different core aspects of an enterprise, such as business
processes, products, applications and infrastructures, as well as the coherence
between these aspects.
As discussed in [2], enterprise architecture is a steering instrument enabling
informed governance. Important applications of enterprise architecture are there-
fore the analysis of problems in the current state of an enterprise, determining
the desired future state(s), and ensuring that the development projects within
transformation programs are indeed on-track with regards to the desired fu-
ture states. This implies that in enterprise architecture models, coherence and
overview are more important than specificity and detail. This also implies the
need for more coarse grained modelling concepts than the finer grained concepts
which can typically be found in modelling languages used at the level of specific
development projects, such as e.g. UML [3] and BPMN [4]. Therefore a new
language was needed, leading to the development of the ArchiMate language [1].
The ArchiMate language was developed as part of a collaborative research
project, funded partly by the Dutch government and involving several Dutch

T. Halpin et al. (Eds.): BPMDS 2009 and EMMSAD 2009, LNBIP 29, pp. 367–380, 2009.

c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009
368 M.M. Lankhorst, H.A. Proper, and H. Jonkers

Fig. 1. An example ArchiMate model

research institutes, as well as governmental and financial institutions. The re-


sults of the project in general are described in detail in [1] as well as several
papers [5, 6, 7, 8]. An illustrative example of an ArchiMate model is provided in
Figure 1. Meanwhile, the ArchiMate language has been transferred to the Open
Group, where it is slated to become the standard for architectural description
accompanying the Open Group’s architecture framework TOGAF [9].
The ArchiMate standard consists of six primary components:
A framework – A conceptual framework consisting which allows classification
of architectural phenomena.
An abstract syntax – This component contains the formal definition of the
language in terms of a meta-model, providing the characteristics of each language
construct, and its relationships to other language constructs.
Modelling concepts – A set of modelling concepts allowing for the description
of relevant aspects of enterprises at the enterprise level. This set underlies the
abstract syntax, focussing on the concepts and their meaning, seperate from the
language constructs in which they are used.
The language semantics – This component defines the meaning of each lan-
guage construct and relation type.

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