Towards a Unified and Modular Approach for Visual Analysis of Enterprise Models

From the point of view of an enterprise architect, the visual analysis of the structure of an Enterprise Model can provide powerful insights and facilitate various analysis tasks. However, analysis methods and visualizations that offer the most valuable results usually depend on the concepts found on the Enterprise Metamodel, and are subjected to a concrete EA modeling tool. In this paper we argue that many structural and domain-specific analysis methods can be automated, composed, and their results visualized in a modular manner. To achieve this, we describe the foundations of a flexible and configurable approach for EA Analysis that is based on components that encapsulate metamodel-specific analysis and visualization techniques, supported by a metamodel-independent platform. The approach is explained with ArchiMate by using a module, currently in development, which we call PRIMate. Benefits from this approach include the integration with existing modeling environments, the reuse of analysis and visualization capabilities in any metamodel, as well as an explicit, composite, and traceable visual analysis process.