Multi-diagram Representation of Enterprise Architecture: Information Visualization Meets Enterprise Information Management

Modeling Enterprise Architecture (EA) requires the representation of multiple views for an enterprise. This could be done by a team of stakeholders having different backgrounds. The enterprise model built by the team consists of a large number of model elements capturing various aspects of the enterprise. To deal with this high complexity, each stakeholder of the team may want to view only a certain aspect of the enterprise model of her interest. Essentially, the stakeholders need a modeling framework for their EA modeling. We devise a visual modeling language and develop a supporting tool called SeamCAD. Instead of managing a list of ill-related diagrams, the tool manages a coherent enterprise model and generates diagrams on demand, i.e. based on the stakeholders' modeling scope and interests. The notation of the SeamCAD language was based on the Unified Modeling Language and comes with distinctive layout for the purposes of visually and explicitly showing hierarchical containment in the diagrams. We also report industrial applications of our tool and language in this paper. We position our work at the intersection of information visualization and enterprise information management.