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.