This paper shows how XML can be used for static and dynamic analysis of architectures. Our analysis is based on the distinction between symbolic and semantic models of architectures. The core of a symbolic model consists of its signature that specifies symbolically its structural elements and their relationships. A semantic model is defined as a formal interpretation of the symbolic model. This provides a formal approach to the design of architectural description languages and a general mathematical foundation for the use of formal methods in enterprise architectures. For dynamic analysis we define transformations of models of architectures, modeled in XML, and for this purpose the XML vocabulary for an architecture is extended with a few constructs defined in the Rule Markup Language (RML). There are RML tools available that perform the desired transformations.
In this paper we introduce a logical viewpoint on architectures. The logical viewpoint is based on the distinction between symbolic and semantic models of architectures. The core of a symbolic model consists of its signature that specifies symbolically its structural elements and their relationships. A semantic model is defined as a formal interpretation of the symbolic model. This leads to more precise characterization of the concepts introduced in IEEE standard 1471-2000, and provides a formal approach to the design of enterprise of architectural description languages and a general mathematical foundation for the use of formal methods in enterprise architectures.Additionally, we show how this logical viewpoint allows for the definition of a simple general XML language for the description of both static and dynamic aspects of an architecture. For the meta-analysis of both these aspects we introduce a new XML tool for general XML transformations based on a Rule Markup Language.
In this paper we report on the use of XML transformations in the context of Enterprise Architectures. We show that XML transformation techniques can be applied to visualize and analyze enterprise architectures in a formal way. We propose transformational techniques to extract views from an XML document containing architectural information and indicate how to perform a specific form of impact analysis on this information. The transformations are formally expressed with the language RML, a compact yet powerful transformation language developed at CWI, which obtains its power from regular expressions defined on XML documents. We discuss a tool that has been built on top of it to visualize the results of the transformations and illustrate the advantages of our approach: the genericity of XML, the application of a single technique (namely XML transformations) for various tasks, and the benefits of having a model viewer which is in complete ignorance of the architectural language used.
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