Towards a Multi-Level Model of Enterprise Architecture
Modeling Notations
Ahmed Hussein
1
and Simon Hacks
2 a
1
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
2
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Keywords:
Enterprise Architecture Modeling, Multi-Level Model, Meta-Meta-Model, Taxonomy.
Abstract:
Over the past few decades, the field of enterprise architecture (EA) has grown, and many EA modeling nota-
tions have been proposed. In order to support the different needs, the different notations vary in the element
types that they provide in their metamodel. This abundance of elements makes it difficult for the end-user to
differentiate between the various elements and complicates the model transformation between different EA
model notations. Therefore, this research analyzes existing EA frameworks and their modeling notations and
extracts common properties. First, we performed a literature review to identify common EA frameworks and
their modeling notations. Second, based on the found notations’ concepts, we create a taxonomy based on
their similarities that leads to a multi-level model of EA notations.
Our results showed that The Open Group Architecture Framework, ArchiMate, Department of Defense Ar-
chitecture Framework, and Integrated Architecture Framework are the most used EA frameworks. Those
frameworks served as input for a multi-level model comprising the common concepts of the different model-
ing notations.
1 INTRODUCTION
Although digital transformation offers organizations
great potential for improvement, it comes with addi-
tional challenges such as increasing complexity of IT
systems. Other challenges are business-IT alignment
and changing environments. Moreover, the stakehold-
ers have different needs that should be addressed by
both the business and IT (Hacks et al., 2017). These
challenges can be addressed by means of enterprise
architecture (EA), which can help to address all stake-
holders’ concerns (The Open Group, 2019), and the
implementation fosters organization’s success (Zach-
man, 1987) and balances IT efficiency and business
innovation (Shah and Kourdi, 2007).
The idea behind EA has originated since the
1960s (Kotusev, 2016b). Through the years, the con-
cept of EA has evolved, producing a holistic view to
align strategy, operations, and technology of the orga-
nization in order to achieve its business goals. Using
EA ensures better alignment with business objectives
and consistency across the organization, allows rec-
ognizing potential improvements (Steen et al., 2004)
a
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0478-9347
and provides a general understanding of the enter-
prise (Franke et al., 2009). Moreover, it improves
return on existing investments while minimizing the
risk of future investments (The Open Group, 2018).
To assess the current state of the organization and
ease the EAs evolution, EA models are defined. An
EA model is a representation of the whole’s enterprise
EA that consists of multiple views and architectural
models (The Open Group, 2019; Department of De-
fense, 2010). The goal of an EA model is to capture
the most important components of an enterprise and
the relations between them so that the current state
can be visualized, reviewed, and future desired states
can be planned (Department of Defense, 2010; Hacks
and Lichter, 2018a; Hacks and Lichter, 2018b).
In the past decades, many researchers have been
attracted to the field of EA, and a plethora of different
EA modeling notations has been proposed (The Open
Group, 2019; The Open Group, 2018; Department of
Defense, 2010; Federal CIO Council, 2013; MOD,
2012; Wout et al., 2010). Unfortunately, one can rec-
ognize that notations get more and more extensive, in-
cluding more and more different element types to sat-
isfy the different needs. For example, ArchiMate (The
Open Group, 2019) includes more than 50 different
466
Hussein, A. and Hacks, S.
Towards a Multi-Level Model of Enterprise Architecture Modeling Notations.
DOI: 10.5220/0011706700003467
In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2023) - Volume 2, pages 466-473
ISBN: 978-989-758-648-4; ISSN: 2184-4992
Copyright
c
2023 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
elements in the latest specification. ArchiMate 3.0.1
introduced more than 15 new elements from its pre-
decessor, such as “Events”, “Outcome”, and “Capa-
bility” and ArchiMate 3.1 has added ”Value stream”.
One problem with introducing more elements is
that it will be difficult to create a concise dictionary
of elements definitions. According to ArchiMate, the
“Value Stream” is defined as “a sequence of activi-
ties that create an overall result for a customer, stake-
holder, or end user” (The Open Group, 2019). This
definition is very similar to the “Business process” el-
ement, which is already included in the previous ver-
sions. Despite the similarity in the definition, they are
intended to be used differently. The “Value stream”
describes the organization’s business model and value
proposition, while “Business process” describes the
operating model (The Open Group, 2019). This sim-
ilarity between the different elements will mean that
an end user will have to go through the full specifica-
tions in order to determine what element to use.
This abundance of elements can make it difficult
for the end-user to differentiate between the uses of
the different elements to specify what elements match
their needs. Moreover, it hinders the transformation
of the respective EA models between the different no-
tations. In the context of the Unified Modeling Lan-
guage (UML), Leroux at al. (Leroux et al., 2006) ar-
gue that having a limited number of elements (while
allowing for extension) typically makes the notation
richer and easier to use. We argue that the same can
be applied to EA modeling notations.
Accordingly, we analyze existing EA modeling
notations and determine their common properties.
These properties include architectural elements, their
attributes, and the relationships between them (Franke
et al., 2009). Additionally, we present the common
elements in layers a multi-level model (Frank, 2014;
Atkinson and K
¨
uhne, 2001) that is capable of describ-
ing the different notations. This yields a better under-
standing of the concepts behind the different elements
and how they interact with each other.
In order to achieve this, we address the following
research questions:
What are the most commonly used EA modeling
frameworks in scientific research?
1
What are the common properties of EA modeling
that are present in the different notations?
1
It is criticizable to opt for scientific research here as
it does not necessarily reflect the reality in organizations.
However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no reliable
statistics about the usage of EA frameworks in organiza-
tions available, while it is the case for scientific research on
EA frameworks (e.g., (Barbosa et al., 2019)).
To answer these questions, we discuss next the dif-
ferent methods that we applied in our research. After-
wards, we present the multi-level model as the result
of the first iterations considering different EA model-
ing frameworks. This is followed by a discussion on
the findings and the limitations of our work. Before
our conclusion, we shed light on related work.
2 METHOD
In order to answer the research questions, we per-
formed our research in four phases:
Firstly, we studied the relevant literature about
EA, and the provided metamodels of the com-
monly used EA frameworks. A literature review
has been conducted following the guidelines of
Kitchenham and Charters (Kitchenham and Char-
ters, 2007). The outcome of this step was a set of
EA modeling frameworks in which each of them
provides a publicly available metamodel.
Secondly, the most commonly used EA frame-
works were selected, and their metamodels were
studied and analyzed in order to come up with a
list of the entity types that are supported in the se-
lected modeling frameworks.
After that, we followed Nickerson et al. (Nick-
erson et al., 2013) to classify the elements into
a taxonomy that we used to determine the multi-
level model. The classification was based on the
similarities between the different EA frameworks
and was performed in multiple iterations to define
characteristic group elements.
Finally, the elements and the taxonomy were re-
ported, presented, and discussed.
2.1 Literature Review
To identify the primary studies, we searched in ACM
Digital library, Google Scholar, IEEExplore, Sci-
enceDirect, and Springer Link. The search terms
were enterprise architecture management”, enter-
prise architecture framework”, enterprise architec-
ture modeling”, “enterprise architecture implementa-
tion”, and “developing enterprise architecture”.
Each of the search term produced tens of thou-
sands of results for each of the electronic sources. For
each source, the results were sorted by relevance to
the search term (an estimation of how much a specific
document in the results is related to the search query
(Zhang et al., 2018)). After that, the top 20 papers
were selected resulting in a total of 500 studies.
Towards a Multi-Level Model of Enterprise Architecture Modeling Notations
467
Table 1: Most used EA frameworks.
EA framework Number of studies
TOGAF 40
ArchiMate 37
Zachman 22
DoDAF 15
FEAF 12
IAF 4
Gartner 3
MODAF 3
TEAF 2
GERAM 2
To select only the relevant studies, the following
inclusion and exclusion criteria were defined:
Inclusion criteria:
1. Studies in English.
2. Studies with full text available.
3. Research articles, conference proceedings, and
book chapters.
4. Studies with focus on EA frameworks.
5. Studies aiming to apply concepts from, ad-
dress limitations of, or critically evaluate an EA
framework.
Exclusion criteria:
1. Studies not in English.
2. Secondary studies, i.e., excluding any SLR.
In addition to the inclusion and exclusion criteria,
the following criteria were set to assess the quality of
the selected studies.
1. Is the goal of the study stated and explained?
2. Is the context in which the study was performed
described?
3. Is the choice of the selected EA framework(s) mo-
tivated?
4. Is the direction for future work discussed?
5. Is the validity and reliability of the study dis-
cussed?
After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria
and ignoring duplicate studies, 78 studies have been
included, conducted between 2004 and 2021. After
synthesizing the collected data, we identified TOGAF
as the most used EA framework, followed by Archi-
Mate. Table 1 shows the top 10 used EA frameworks.
Next, each framework was analyzed to identify
their EA modeling capabilities, based on their spec-
ifications (The Open Group, 2019; The Open Group,
2018; Department of Defense, 2010; Wout et al.,
2010; Federal CIO Council, 2013; Bernus et al.,
2003; MOD, 2012). The Zachman framework, and
Gartner Framework are considered proprietary frame-
works (Hadaya et al., 2020) so they were excluded.
Additionally, the Treasury Enterprise Architecture
Framework (TEAF) was also excluded as we could
not find a formal specification.
On the other hand, the Generalised Enterprise
Reference Architecture and Methodology (GERAM)
provides a set of requirements that other EA frame-
works should meet. Thus, the framework is actually
considered to be a meta-framework and is intended to
aid the development of EA frameworks (Bernus et al.,
2003; Bernus et al., 2015). Moreover, many studies
have analyzed and mapped existing EA frameworks
to GERAM, such as (Noran, 2003a; Noran, 2003b;
Noran, 2005; Williams and Li, 1999; Saha, 2004;
Chaharsooghi and Ahmadi Achachlouei, 2011).
While FEAF focuses on EA modeling, it does not
provide a metamodel. The framework instead pro-
vides a set of reference models. Accordingly, we do
also neglect this framework.
Following EA modeling frameworks were iden-
tified as relevant for our multi-level model of EA
modeling notations: (1) TOGAF, (2) ArchiMate, (3)
DoDAF, (4) IAF, (5) MODAF.
2.2 Multi-Level Model Development
To the best of our knowledge, there is no concrete ap-
proach to develop a multi-level model based on dif-
ferent sources. However, the challenge of developing
a multi-level model that relies on common properties
is similar to the challenge to develop a taxonomy for
a certain domain, which is the process of classifying
or categorizing objects into different groups. Accord-
ingly, we want to classify the elements that are avail-
able in the selected EA framework metamodels based
on the similarities between those frameworks.
There are multiple approaches to generate a tax-
onomy (Nickerson et al., 2013; Harst et al., 2021; Us-
man et al., 2017). We followed Nickerson et al. (Nick-
erson et al., 2013) to generate our multi-level model,
as it is a widely used methodology in information sys-
tems literature with over 700 citations.
Nickerson et al. (Nickerson et al., 2013) first
define a basis for the choosing characteristics, i.e.,
meta-characteristic and end conditions. In our case,
the meta-characteristic is defined and to generate the
characteristics of the taxonomy: “Structural elements
similarities between the different metamodels” to ad-
dress our second research question.
Next, one defines ending conditions of the itera-
tions:
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Figure 1: Taxonomy dimensions.
All elements of the EA framework are examined.
For all dimensions, each characteristic has at least
one element classified under it.
All dimensions and characteristics are unique.
In the last iteration, no modification, additions, or
deletions has been made to the dimensions nor the
characteristics.
The taxonomy is comprehensive, extensible, and
concise.
In total, we performed three iterations. The first
iteration included elements from TOGAF and Archi-
Mate, and each of the following iterations added el-
ements from one additional EA framework (DoDAF
and IAF, respectively).
3 A MULTI-LEVEL MODEL OF
EA MODELING NOTATIONS
To provide a basis for our multi-level model, we cre-
ated a taxonomy within three iterations based on the
found aspects in the considered frameworks. The tax-
onomy is comprised of the three dimensions, “Layer”,
“Behavior”, and “W3H” (Contextual (Why), Concep-
tual (What), Physical (With what), Logical (How)),
and respective classifying items (cf. Figure 1).
Table 2 shows the result of the created taxonomy
for the common elements in the different frameworks.
Each column in the table represents a characteristic of
the taxonomy, and the characteristics are grouped by
the dimensions mentioned above. An element (row)
can be classified in one and only one of the charac-
teristics of each dimension (marked with an x). The
final taxonomy result shows that within the common
elements of the four EA frameworks, most elements
focus on describing the business aspects, activities,
and concepts when looking at the “Layer”, “Behav-
ior”, and ”W3H” dimensions respectively.
The taxonomy provides a common abstraction for
the different frameworks. After the taxonomy was
created, the closest concepts (elements) in the dif-
ferent frameworks were grouped together to find the
common elements that are shown in Table 2. This
was done by comparing the different definitions of the
concepts by one of the researchers and regular dis-
cussion rounds on the constructed taxonomy between
both of the researchers.
Table 3 provides some examples for mapping
the closest concepts in the different EA frameworks,
where closeness means the similarity between the
concept descriptions determined by the researchers.
Even though some concepts are not explicitly avail-
able in a framework, some more granular elements
fall under it. For example, TOGAF does not explic-
itly define an abstract “Performer” element, but there
are multiple elements available in TOGAF that can
be classified as “Performers”. On the other hand,
DoDAF uses the same term to describe both physi-
cal and logical application components, while other
frameworks provide separate elements.
The hierarchical structure of the common ele-
ments is visualized in a figure
2
. At the top, elements
are divided into Behavior, Resource and Motivation
elements, i.e., using the Behavior dimension. Then,
elements are divided into different layers, Business,
Data, Application, and Technology layers.
When creating the multilevel model for the com-
mon elements, we used the aforementioned hierarchi-
cal structure to assign elements to their corresponding
level. Elements at the lowest level are assigned to M2
3
and with each level we increase the model level until
we reach M6 for the top abstract element. Our figure
4
shows the multilevel model for the generic common
elements. On the other hand, we visualize
5
the ele-
ments from the different layers.
4 DISCUSSION
The first research question of this study aimed at iden-
tifying the most used EA modeling frameworks in the
relevant literature. Our findings support the claims of
previous studies (Cameron and McMillan, 2013; Mo-
2
https://github.com/simonhacks/iceis2023/blob/main/
Elements\%20Structure.png
3
M0 and M1 has not been assigned to any of the ele-
ments, since they typically refer to the real-world user ob-
jects and the elements of a specific EA model, respectively.
4
https://github.com/simonhacks/iceis2023/blob/main/
multilevel model generic.png
5
https://github.com/simonhacks/iceis2023/blob/main/
multilevel model layers.png
Towards a Multi-Level Model of Enterprise Architecture Modeling Notations
469
Table 2: Classification of the common elements.
Layer Behavior W3H
Element B D A T G Ab Ac E O P DR G Ct Cp L P
Role x x x
Actor x x x
Data x x x
Business Object x x x
Business Service x x x
Application Service x x x
Technology Service x x x
Business Event x x x
Goal x x x
Objective x x x
Organization Unit x x x
Physical Application
Component
x x x
Physical Technology
Component
x x x
Contract x x x
Business Process x x x
Logical Business
Component
x x x
Logical Application
Component
x x x
Logical Technology
Component
x x x
Principle x x x
Requirement x x x
Constraint x x x
Course of Action x x x
Capability x x x
Project x x x
Layer:
B
Business,
D
Data,
A
Application,
T
Technology,
G
Generic.
Behavior:
Ab
Ability,
Ac
Activity,
E
Event,
O
Object,
P
Performer,
DR
Desired Result,
G
Guidance.
W3H:
Ct
Contextual,
Cp
Conceptual,
L
Logical,
P
Physical.
hamed et al., 2012; Kotusev, 2016a; Barbosa et al.,
2019) that TOGAF is the most used EA framework,
often in combination with ArchiMate.
The goal of the second research question was to
identify common architectural elements in EA model-
ing frameworks. The taxonomy dimensions cube was
inspired by the ArchiMate layers as well as the IAF
content framework abstraction levels. The “Layer”
dimension is influenced by TOGAF, IAF, and Archi-
mate, since DoDAF does not provide a classification
for the elements into different layers. Similarly, the
“Behavior” dimension is influenced by the aspect ar-
eas of ArchiMate and the elements from DoDAF. Our
dimension has more granular characteristics than the
ArchiMate aspect areas, mainly due to the high level
abstract elements available in DoDAF; such as Ac-
tivity” and “Desired Result” which group multiple
concepts together. The last dimension is what we
call “W3H” which is derived from how IAF, and to
some extent TOGAF, to group elements into concep-
tual, logical, physical, and contextual elements.
The four EA frameworks share a total of 24 el-
ements in addition to 13 abstract elements. TOGAF
has the lowest number of elements defined in its meta-
model compared to the other EA frameworks. TO-
GAF content metamodel only defines a total of 38 ele-
ments, while ArchiMate defines 59 elements, IAF and
DoDAF has more than 80 elements defined. Addi-
tionally, the business architecture has more elements
in common between the different frameworks. This
can be traced back to TOGAF and IAF; since DoDAF
does not provide an elements’ layers taxonomy, and
ArchiMate has a relatively close number of elements
in business, application, and technology layers
Moreover, we noticed the ambiguity of terms in
EA modeling as different terms in different EA frame-
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Table 3: An Extract from mapping the closest concepts in TOGAF, ArchiMate, DoDAF and IAF.
Concept TOGAF ArchiMate DoDAF IAF
Business Service Business Service Business Service Service Business Service
Business Process Process Business Process Process Business Service
Logical Applica-
tion Component
Logical Applica-
tion Component
Application Func-
tion
System Logical IS Compo-
nent
Physical Applica-
tion Component
Physical Applica-
tion Component
Application Com-
ponent
System Physical IS Com-
ponent
Performer *** Active Structure Performer ***
Business Object *** Business Object Information Business Object
Driver Driver Driver N/A Business Driver
N/A
Concept not available in the EA framework.
***
Concept not explicitly available, but multiple elements fall under it.
works might refer to the same concept (cf. Table 3).
For example, IAF uses the term “Business Service”
to describe both internal processes and externally pro-
vided services. According to IAF, the business service
element can be used on different levels of details de-
pending on the goal of the architecture (Wout et al.,
2010). This adds to the findings of previous studies
that showed the deviations in both the definition of
EA (Saint-Louis et al., 2017) and what is considered
an EA framework (Franke et al., 2009).
Our work has some limitations. First, we focused
only on analyzing the common elements used in EA
modeling. Even though we tried to describe these ele-
ments in a multilevel model, the relationships used in
the model were not extracted using the same method
we used to extract the elements due to complexity.
However, in a next iteration, we plan to address this.
Additionally, different other frameworks such as
GERAM (Generalised Enterprise Reference Archi-
tecture and Methodology) or MODAF were not in-
cluded when developing the taxonomy and analyzing
the common elements, due to time limitations. In-
cluding the additional elements might result in the
generation of more dimensions in the taxonomy or
identifying more abstract elements. Moreover, to en-
sure that no additional dimensions are added to the
taxonomy in the last iteration, more iterations were
needed, i.e., more frameworks and more time.
Finally, it would been beneficial to include the in-
put from practitioners. That would help to define the
common elements from the end users’ points of view.
5 RELATED WORK
Before concluding our work, we focus on related liter-
ature about EA frameworks and, specifically on pre-
vious literature reviews on EA and EA frameworks.
Finally, we discuss research on metamodeling in EA.
Hadaya et al. (Hadaya et al., 2020) proposed a
methodology to evaluate EA frameworks based on 14
criteria. Their goal was to make it easier for EA prac-
titioners to select the framework that addresses their
needs. They first performed a systematic literature
review (SLR) on EA framework evaluation criteria.
They concluded that previous EA literature does not
define comprehensive evaluation criteria. Therefore,
they developed their own evaluation criteria contain-
ing features like architecture layers taxonomy, archi-
tecture taxonomy aspect areas, metamodel complete-
ness and complexity, or development process. Next,
they tested it with a set of six EA frameworks and
different domain experts, who perceived most of the
proposed criteria to be usable, relevant, and correct.
Zhou et al. (Zhou et al., 2020) performed a SLR
on EA visualization methodologies. The results show
that there is no comprehensive methodology for EA
modeling. Thus, they proposed a method for EA vi-
sualization that aims to address the shortcomings of
the previous methods. Moreover, Zhou et al. (Zhou
et al., 2020) found that the most used EA frameworks
were TOGAF and DoDAF with more than 60 respec-
tively 20 studies using them. Additionally, they re-
ported that ArchiMate was the most used modeling
language, with more than 40 papers using it.
Saint-Louis et al. (Saint-Louis et al., 2017) inves-
tigated the deviations in EA definitions. They ex-
amined 145 definitions and concluded that there are
considerable differences in the definitions. Frank et
al. (Franke et al., 2009) suggested a meta frame-
work for EA frameworks to examine if the content
of a specific EA framework satisfies practitioners’
needs. They divided the content of EA frameworks
into “architectural governance” and “EA modeling
concepts”. As part of the study, the content of mul-
tiple frameworks has been examined and classified.
Comparably, Cameron and McMillan (Cameron and
McMillan, 2013) investigated the usage and char-
Towards a Multi-Level Model of Enterprise Architecture Modeling Notations
471
acteristics of various EA frameworks to provide a
method for selecting the right EA for an organization.
Another study that aims to help practitioners select
the EA framework that satisfies a specific criterion, is
the study performed by Urbaczewski and Mrdalj (Ur-
baczewski and Mrdalj, 2006), which compared five
frameworks. The study provides guidelines for com-
paring EA frameworks based on the viewpoints and
the aspects they support.
In the field of EA, modeling is considered to be a
focus of many EA frameworks (Franke et al., 2009).
Therefore, EA frameworks usually define a meta-
model in order to define a structure for the archi-
tectural artifacts and ensure consistency when using
them to develop an EA (The Open Group, 2018; De-
partment of Defense, 2010; Wout et al., 2010). Addi-
tionally, it allows architecture tools vendors to create
easier to use tools by adding consistency and inter-
operability to the tools they create (The Open Group,
2011). The metamodel of an EA framework is de-
fined by defining the allowed content in an architec-
tural model. The content consists of the entity types
(architectural elements), element attributes and the
relationships between the different elements (Franke
et al., 2009; The Open Group, 2019; The Open Group,
2018; Department of Defense, 2010; Wout et al.,
2010). Some frameworks even define their graphical
representation of it content (The Open Group, 2019;
Atkinson and K
¨
uhne, 2020), while others only define
the allowed entities and the relations textually (The
Open Group, 2018; Department of Defense, 2010;
Wout et al., 2010).
Atkinson and K
¨
uhne (Atkinson and K
¨
uhne, 2020)
suggested improving the ArchiMate modeling stan-
dard through the use of multi-level modeling. The
study used deep modeling to describe ArchiMate and
then discusses the potential improvements using the
concepts of deep modeling in EA. They claimed that
deep modeling can simplify the usage of the Archi-
Mate language and improve its expressiveness.
6 CONCLUSION
In this work, we performed an analysis of the most
used EA frameworks (TOGAF, ArchiMate, DoDAF,
and IAF) in the EA literature and extracted the core
elements of EA modeling. Then, a taxonomy of el-
ements was created based on the frameworks’ ele-
ments. The created taxonomy helped in identifying
what concepts are available in the different EA frame-
works. Next, we identified the common elements that
are available in the different EA frameworks. Fi-
nally, the common elements are presented in both hi-
erarchical structure and in a multi-level model that
shows how the different elements can interact with
each other.
We believe that the findings will be interesting for
EA researchers and practitioners working on develop-
ing and maintaining EA modeling frameworks. Ex-
isting EA modeling frameworks might use the list of
common elements identified in this study as their core
elements, while using the rest of the elements just on
demand. Additionally, practitioners can use the tax-
onomy to identify what element types are provided
by the different EA modeling frameworks, thus in-
creasing their ability to identify matching EA model-
ing frameworks.
For future work, we plan to demonstrate our work
on real world cases in which different EA notations
are used and need to be mapped to each other. A
possible case could be the analysis of EA quality at-
tributes and to abstract the definition of respective
queries while still keeping their semantics (Smajevic
et al., 2021).
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