Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

João Soares, José Tribolet and André Vasconcelos
"What architectural evidences should be considered in order to construct a TA?"' The answer to
this question will lead to a well defined set of architectural evidences, ranging from, e.g., simple
logs produced by servers, to network events. The approach to do so, will take into account
different IT contexts.
"How to automatically collect and identify architectural evidences" This is one of the challenges of
this work, because it will allow an efficient, fast and ruled collection of data, which will be a major
improvement regarding the creation of TAs from scratch. On the other hand, in cases where
architectures are already modeled, will allow them to be much more maintainable since the
process of incorporating changes will be much more agile.
"How to map architectural evidences into updated, trustworthy and reliable TA models?"' The
answer to this question urges because there is a recognized difficulty in maintaining models
updated and aligned with the reality.
3. Related work
3.1 EA methods and frameworks
The aim of this section is to introduce and describe some of the tools that enterprise architects use to
understand and document the structure and dynamics of an enterprise. The investigation that
constitutes the backbone of this article contemplated and compared other Frameworks like Zachman
Framework (Zachman, J., 2008), TOGAF (TOGAF, 2009), etc., but, for the sake of brevity and to
emphasize their relevance, only two of them will be presented here.
3.1.1 ArchiMate
ArchiMate’s aim is to support the description, analysis and visualization of EA with special focus on
inter-domain relations, i.e., it provides the possibility to model the main elements (and their
dependencies) within each domain and the relations between different domains , a feature that other
description languages don't have (Lankhorst, M. et al., 2009). The core concept in ArchiMate is the
service concept. A service is a unit of functionality that some entity makes available to its
environment. This leads to a layered view of enterprise architecture models, where the service
concept is one of the bridges between different layers. ArchiMate concepts are organized in three
layers: Business Layer, Application Layer and Technology Layer.
One of the strengths of ArchiMate is the powerful potential to align and link subsets of EA. This facet
is particularly interesting in the context of the organizations addressed by this work, because there is
a lack of knowledge of a global ISA.
3.1.2 Framework CEO 2007
This framework (Vasconcelos, 2007) features a taxonomy of concepts used to define an ISA
(architectural primitives). The meta-model of Framework CEO 2007 is organized in the following
architectures: Business
Architecture
Architecture, Organizational Architecture and Information Systems
This framework will serve as the conceptual basis for the description of TAs and ISAs during this
work, because it was developed in the context of the group CODE 1 , as this work is.
3.2 Application discovery and dependency mapping
Application discovery is the process of automatically analyzing artifacts of a software application.
Dependency Mapping creates visibility between applications and infrastructure dependencies.
Leveraging the power of automation, automated application discovery and subsequent dependency
mapping, can capture, connect and unveil intricate relationships including the way in which
applications behave and relate to the TA on which they rely. Automated application discovery
normally leverages an effective non-agent-based discovery method - passive discovery - to
automatically discover the structural and behavioral aspects of applications. Passive discovery
operates by watching the network traffic, examining all the applications as they execute, and then
identifying relationships based on real business usage. Some products often use a hybrid approach,
1 Center for Organizational Design and Engineering - INESC
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