As enterprise architecture initiatives grow to span multiple teams, geographies, and time zones, the repositories and tools supporting them face real challenges: information overload, ownership conflicts, version management, and the need to present different views to different user communities. This paper formalises a set of meta model and meta-meta model extensions — including context, domains, filters, versioning, and scenarios — developed through real-world deployment of a collaborative EA modelling platform. The result is a more manageable, flexible, and scalable foundation for large-scale collaborative architecture work.
Cooking up a MEAL: Creating a Meta Enterprise Architecture Language
Enterprise architecture tools struggle to interoperate, and existing exchange standards like XMI are notoriously unreliable in practice. This paper proposes MEAL — a Meta Enterprise Architecture Language — a human-readable, domain-specific language designed to define, populate, query, and analyse EA models and repositories, and to serve as a high-level API between tools. It presents the requirements, a prototype implementation in Smalltalk, and example syntax demonstrating the concept's practical promise.
An Advanced Meta-Meta Model for Visual Language Design and Tooling
Most enterprise modelling tools hard-code their notations and meta models, making adaptation slow, expensive, and technically demanding. This paper presents an advanced meta-meta model — the foundational layer that governs how modelling languages and tools are defined — designed to support arbitrary meta models, multiple visual representations, multi-level modelling, and runtime adaptation without specialist programming skills. Targeting a property graph implementation, it draws on two decades of experience with the EVA toolset and a systematic review of leading platforms including Eclipse, MetaEdit+, and XModeler.
Function Modelling Explained: From Mission to Capabilities via Goals, Processes and Services
Function modelling is one of the most versatile and underused techniques in enterprise architecture — a hierarchical decomposition from mission to activities that brings clarity to scope, responsibility, and design. This white paper introduces function modelling and shows how it connects to goal modelling, process analysis, service design, and capability definition, providing a unified picture of how these paradigms relate and reinforce each other. It is a practical guide for architects, analysts, and anyone trying to make sense of what an organisation does and how to design what it should do next.