Will there be a battle between Archimate and the UML?

re: Will there be a battle between Archimate and the UML?

youness LEMRABET — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 18:53:21 GMT

A very interesting article thank you. I have a question... Will there be a battle between Archimate and the BPMN ???

thank's

re: Will there be a battle between Archimate and the UML?

NickMalik — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:57:59 GMT

Hello YL,

BPMN is now widely considered to be one profile of the UML. Note that the UML is composed of many profiles, so adding one more is not difficult. Most UML tools handle both.

Archimate competes with both.

--- N

re: Will there be a battle between Archimate and the UML?

Adrian Campbell — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:36:10 GMT

You say that ".. I have not reviewed it in detail. (I cannot. The open group ‘published’ the ‘standard’ to their members only, not to the rest of the world. Is that what they mean by ‘open standard?’ hmmm.) "

Well you CAN review ArchiMate in full detail at its original ArchiMate web site which is open to all at http://www.archimate.org/ART/">http://www.archimate.org/ART/

This is the online version of the ArchiMate Resource Tree which you can also download (see below).

You can also find a large hoard of useful information, download papers, language primer, presentations and best practice etc at http://www.archimate.org/

At the ArchiMate project web site at https://doc.telin.nl/dsweb/View/Collection-4766 you will find a paper about a proposal for a UML profile for ArchiMate.

At https://doc.telin.nl/dsweb/Get/Document-34522/ArchiMate%20Resource%20Tree.zip you can download the ArchiMate Resource Tree for studying offline.

And finally, the answer to the question 'will there be a battle between ArchiMate and UML?' is no. Both languages serve different purposes and have different stakeholders (ArchiMate at the enterprise/strategic planning level and UML at the solution development level) and will coexist happily.

In my experience many senior stakeholders (c-level executives etc.) in organisations, especially business ones, often find UML far too 'techie' and IT focused and are turned off by it, often refusing even to try and understand it. The same people usually find ArchiMate very much more understandable and approachable. They especially like the Layered Viewpoint which shows multiple architecture layers and multiple aspects all in one diagram.

regards,

Adrian

re: Will there be a battle between Archimate and the UML?

NickMalik — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:15:24 GMT

Thank you, Adrian. The links you provided are very helpful. I will take advantage of the info to provide a more detailed discussion.

As you can see from the blog, I agree that UML and Archimate serve different purposes. I will take a deeper dive before I blog again, so that I can speak intelligently about it.

re: Will there be a battle between Archimate and the UML?

Marc Lankhorst — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:27:36 GMT

To add to Adrian's comments:

In ArchiMate, some symbols were made to resemble those of UML (and BPMN), for easier understanding by those architects familiar with UML (and BPMN). The semantics of these are very close to the UML semantics. Other aspects of the UML notation were deliberately left out, because they provide more detail than necessary or wanted at the architectural abstraction level and thereby clutter your diagrams.

I expect The Open Group to put the ArchiMate standard downloadable on its website in the near future, but their members get access earlier (like they did with TOGAF 9). They just need to flesh out the licensing terms, which will probably resemble those of TOGAF. The new standard document combines and integrates a number of the sources Adrian has mentioned.

Regards,

Marc

re: Will there be a battle between Archimate and the UML?

Marc Lankhorst — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:41:50 GMT

To add to Adrian's comments:

Regards,

Marc

re: Will there be a battle between Archimate and the UML?

Andrew Josey — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:42:34 GMT

The ArchiMate 1.0 Technical standard will be publically available during the week commencing April 27th 2009. The members only edition was for the period while the hardcopy and launch were being prepared. The launch event is in London at the Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference April 28 - May 1st.

re: Will there be a battle between Archimate and the UML?

NickMalik — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:45:39 GMT

Wow, I got some great responses to this post.

I'm glad that the Open Group is about to make the document public. Perhaps it was unfair of me to expect that they would release the document at the same time as they voted to make it a standard. ;-)

Marc: Just as it is foolish to have a field in a database table that holds two different types of values, it is foolish to "reuse" a symbol from one standard in another with "similar" meanings.

I disagree that they were successful and I hope that wisdom will prevail to allow completely different icons to emerge in the final UML profile.

My cursory examination of the Archimate metamodel has shown me some pretty serious gaps and some very odd choices. I'll do a good bit more study before I blog on Archimate, but there is definitely a considerable amount of room for improvement.

--- N

re: Will there be a battle between Archimate and the UML?

Craig Martin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:29:35 GMT

My quick 2 cents. In pursuing the holy grail of enterprise level MDA we began developing complex ontologies to define architecture building blocks. We had these ontologies "communicate" with each other to build relationships at the architecture description level and had each of the concepts and relationships mapped to underlying code generators. A little too ahead of its time since clients were only getting to grips with UML then.

On the back of this we noticed the archimate revival and based upon our above experience, we pigeon holed Archimate as the following. I would value your view on this:

An Archimate model is to an architecture building block, as WSDL is to a service. At a future level we would want to inter-operate at the archimate ABB layer AND the WSDL layer to cater for semantic heterogeneity that occurs in the architecture and especially the SOA landscape.

One step closer to defining services in ontologies and having their definitions map to each other.

Craig

re: Will there be a battle between Archimate and the UML?

Adrian Campbell — Sat, 02 May 2009 02:27:27 GMT

The new ArchiMate 1.0 Specification can now be seen at http://www.opengroup.org/archimate/doc/ts_archimate/

Adrian

Modeling Specification for Enterprise Architecture - ArchiMate®

EDS - The Next Big Thing — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:54:45 GMT

Last month The Open Group formally announced that it had adopted ArchiMate® Version 1 as a standard