Generating Visualizations of Enterprise Architectures using Model Transformations

Abstract

Giving account to the importance of enterprise architecture (EA) modeling, we identify issues in visualization handling that we came across during an extensive survey of existing tools for EA management. We then point to the fundamental principles of software cartography, an approach for EA modeling, including a method for the automatic creation of visualizations based on EA models. This approach is based on model transformations, which 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 illustrates the practical applicability for visual modeling and documenting EA.