Generating Visualizations of Enterprise Architectures using Model Transformations

Abstract

Giving account to the importance of enterprise architecture (EA) modeling, this article sketches common issues in visualization handling that we came across dur- ing an extensive survey of the existing tool support for EA management in 2005. We introduce the research project software cartography, in which we develop an approach for EA modeling including a method for the automatic creation of EA models and vi- sualizations. This approach is based on model transformations, which we use to link the data to be visualized and their graphical representation, thereby circumventing the error prone and time consuming task of manual creation of the visual models. A brief overview of a prototypic implementation of this approach complements the theoretic findings and illustrates applicability for visual modeling and documenting the EA.