What would a purpose-built language for enterprise architecture modelling and tool interoperability look like?
Enterprise architecture tools are powerful in isolation, but interoperability between them remains a persistent problem. The dominant exchange standard, MOF/XMI, is technically complex, inconsistently implemented, and limited to basic data transfer — it carries no domain-specific operations meaningful to architects. This paper argues that what the EA discipline needs is a domain-specific language: human-readable, expressive at the level of architecture concepts, and capable of serving as both an interactive interface and a high-level API between tools.
The proposed language — MEAL, the Meta Enterprise Architecture Language — is designed to handle the full lifecycle of EA work: defining and extending meta models, creating and querying instances, managing versions and contexts, generating outputs in multiple formats, and performing architecture-specific operations such as compatibility and compliance checks. The paper presents a detailed set of functional and non-functional requirements, and describes a working prototype built in the Squeak dialect of Smalltalk, demonstrating that concise, English-like syntax can achieve meaningful meta model definition, instantiation, querying, and export in just a few lines of code.
Intended ultimately as a public domain standard, MEAL addresses a real gap in the EA tooling landscape and offers a practical foundation for anyone working on architecture repository design, tool integration, or the automation of EA governance processes.
Pages: 13
Originally published as a conference paper by Graham McLeod at the EMMSAD 2009 workshop (co-located with CAiSE), 2009.