=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Lightweight Approach For Enterprise Architecture Modeling and Documentation
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-592/PaperDemo13.pdf
|volume=Vol-592
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/caise/NeubertBSM10
}}
==Lightweight Approach For Enterprise Architecture Modeling and Documentation==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-592/PaperDemo13.pdf
Lightweight Approach For Enterprise
Architecture Modeling and Documentation
Sabine Buckl, Florian Matthes, Christian Neubert, and Christian M. Schweda
Technische Universität München, Institute for Informatics,
Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching, Germany
{sabine.buckl,matthes,neubert,schweda}@in.tum.de
http://www.systemcartography.info
Abstract. Enterprise architecture (EA) management is a challenging
task, modern enterprises have to face. This task is often addressed via
organization-specific methodologies, which are implemented or derived
from a respective EA management tool, or are at least partially aligned.
Nevertheless, especially when starting an EA management endeavor, the
documentation of the EA is often not likely to satisfy the level of for-
malization, which is needed to employ an EA management tool. This
paper address the issue of starting EA management, more precise EA
documentation and analysis, by utilizing a wiki-based approach.
Today’s enterprise wiki-systems provide numerous of services such as collabora-
tive authoring, tagging, bookmarking, awareness, commenting, rating, linking,
search, social networking, versioning, access control [1]. Furthermore, recent ef-
forts aim to allow annotating semantic data within the wiki pages’ content in
enterprise wiki-Systems. How these functions can be applied for collaborative en-
terprise architecture (EA) modeling and documentation is explained by means
of the following scenario. We illustrate how to model and describe the concepts
shown in Figure 1 and corresponding instances in a wiki-based manner.
BusinessApplication hosts OrganizationalUnit
name : String * 1 name : String
Fig. 1. UML diagram of the concepts business application and organizational unit
In order to model concepts and attributes (top-down) we use an open tem-
plating mechanism [2]. Thereby two wiki-pages describing the concepts business
application (BA) (cf. Figure 1) and organizational unit (OU) with their name
attributes are defined. To mark the wiki-page as template reserved tags are uti-
lized, e.g. typedef. Since the templates are wiki pages, the concept BA and its
attributes can be described textual in the wiki pages’ content. By using semantic
annotations [3] a ”name” attribute can be defined by marking the literal ”name”
within the text. All attribute-definitions could be shown in a tabular view for
purpose of exposing semi-structured parts of the wiki-page. In some cases it can
be beneficial to define mandatory attributes for a template, e.g. all BAs must
provide a name attribute. This could be achieved by specifying rules on tem-
plate level. In contrast to templates, concepts can also evolve dynamically on
”instantiation” level (bottom-up). Thereby, a wiki-page is created to describe a
2 Authors Suppressed Due to Excessive Length
concrete instance of a BA (cf. Figure 1). To mark the page to be a BA the page
can either be tagged ”business application” on page level or the literal ”business
application” can be marked with semantic annotation within the text, e.g. ”is-
a”. In the latter case a new template (providing all currently in the text defined
attributes) could be created if no BA template exists so far. If a template is
already defined, the assigned attributes (having no values) could be shown in a
tabular view. Furthermore, additional attributes, which are frequently used in
other BA wiki-pages could be recommended by showing them in a tabular view. Start (sebis)
Tags: businessapplication "instance" of BusinesssApplication template
marked up text, representing the value of
SAP Business Suite
the name attribute
Attributes: tabular view of all attribute-value pairs
Attribute Value assigend to the page
customized embedded query showing the
Start (sebis) Name SAP Business Suite
additional attribute "Abbreviation" for
Tags: prototype template typedef Template definition for the organizational units
concept BusinessApplication OrganizationalUnits:
BusinessApplication Ressource Name Abbreviation
A software system, which is part of an information system within an organization. http://wwwmatthes.in.tum.de/wikis/sebis/marketing Marketing MKG
An business application references its hosting OrganizationalUnit and provides a name. http://wwwmatthes.in.tum.de/wikis/sebis/human-resources Human Resources HR
Referenced template Attribute declaration in
Referenced by:
the text (semantic markup) Referenced by: generic view of all referencing instances
OrganizationalUnit
Referencing template Human Resources Marketing
Table 1. Template for the concept BusinessApplication (left) and BusinessApplication
instance ”SAP Business” (right)
Association between concepts can be expressed via hyperlinks to other wiki-
page instances representing an OU, i.e. which are tagged ”organizational unit”.
The latter wiki-page could list all pages (as links) it is referenced by, by means of
backlinks, i.e. links to all BAs the OU is using. This could either be achieved in
a generic manner or by embedding custom queries in the page content. In both
cases it might by useful to customize which attributes of the referencing concept
to be shown. In contrast to define links on concrete (BA) instances (bottom-up),
hyperlinks could also be used on template level to express directional relations
between concepts (top-down). E.g., the literal ”OrganizationalUnit” shown in
Figure 1(left) could be a hyperlink to the OU-template. To express that exactly
one OU is referenced by a link on instance level rules could be applied (cf.
mandatory attributes).
Summary: Both ways of lightweight EA modeling can be applied, top down
by using predefined wiki-templates as well as bottom up by evolving the model
indirectly on the instance level. Wiki-pages can be utilized for documentation
of EA concepts and their instances collaboratively. Besides that, other services
of today’s wiki-systems can be utilized, e.g lists and change feeds to get notified
when the model or the documentation changes.
References
1. T. Büchner, F. Matthes, and C. Neubert. A concept and service based analysis of
commercial and open source enterprise 2.0 tools. In KMIS, pages 37–45, 2009.
2. S. Buckl, F. Matthes, C. Neubert, and C. M. Schweda. A wiki-based approach to
enterprise architecture documentation and analysis. In The 17th European Con-
ference on Information Systems (ECIS) – Information Systems in a Globalizing
World: Challenges, Ethics and Practices, 8. – 10. June 2009, Verona, Italy, pages
2192–2204, Verona, Italy, 2009.
3. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. The dublin core metadata initiative.
http://dublincore.org/ (cited 2010-03-18), 2010.