An MDE Approach to Design Enterprise Architecture Viewpoints

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has risen as a tool to support the process of making strategic business decisions, by achieving an integral vision of business and IT elements of an enterprise. An EA approach provides a better understanding of relationships between concepts from several domains, such as strategy, process, applications, and information. However, this heterogeneous aspect makes EA modeling complex because there are many domain specific modeling languages that were not designed to be integrated. ArchiMate is an architecture description language (ADL) that provides a set of predefined viewpoints to model an EA and enhance the communication between business and IT people by establishing a common language. However, ArchiMate is not clear about the way to customize or create new viewpoints to integrate new domains. This paper describes a Model Driven Engineering (MDE) framework to support the EA modeling activity by taking the ArchiMate language as its foundation. The basis of this framework, are tools to specify ArchiMate and its future domain specific extensions. It also supports the composition and customization of these domains to define a common EA terminology. Finally, it offers tools to define customized viewpoints and to build the applications that stakeholders need to interact with the EA models.