Semantical Annotation of ArchiMate and deployment through IaC

Started by raphaelha, March 26, 2023, 14:42:11 PM

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raphaelha

Hi everyone,

this is my first time writing in a public forum so please excuse me if I make any formal mistakes and I hope I'm writing in the correct forum section  :) .

I'm currently at the beginning of writing my masters thesis about the semantical annotation of ArchiMate and the subsequent deployment through IaC. The premise of the thesis is that I firstly define a domain specific semantic for ArchiMate in the context of Cloud Computing. Secondly, I want to program a prototype which takes an ArchiMate Model) and converts it to Terraform commands with the help of the defined semantics.

I believe that this image which I attached may help to outline the general idea for what I intend to achieve.
workflow.PNG


As an IT guy who loves virtualization and scripting, I should know my way around using Terraform and the deployment in the cloud. Through literature I should also be able to describe the concepts of models, syntax, semantic, ontologies ...

I know that ArchiMate doesn't define semantics in this way, because that would destroy the entire purpose of using a modelling language which can be used for any enterprise architecture. But in this case I would like to semantically annotate ArchiMate so it fits my enterprise architecture for cloud computing (which also can be automated).

The reason why I'm writing this blog entry is to ask if anyone has experience in defining semantics for modelling languages or literature about it. I could write "Pseudo code" and say "IF Green Cube than Linux VM", but a semantic (as far as I know, feel free to correct me) should be defined in an XML or an ontology. Maybe someone has done something similar or could provide expertise/literature on what such a semantic "computer readable" file could look like or how to define it.

Thanks to everyone for reading my post and best regards,
Raphael

Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie

Hi,

I'm not aware of any standard way to define such semantic, so I think you'll have to define your own.

One remark though: don't rely on colors, use ArchiMate language customization mechanisms to define specializations and profiles (specializations are supported in Archi but not profiles for the moment, so you'll have to define your own naming convention).

Regards,

JB
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raphaelha

Hi Jean-Baptiste,

thanks for the response. I'll have a look at the mentioned specializations  :D .


Best regards,
Raphael