A Generative Approach for Creating Stakeholder-specific Enterprise Architecture Views

Understanding the architectures of complex system, e.g. enterprises, is greatly facilitated by using graphical views thereof. These views result from the application of an underlying viewpoint to a comprehensive architectural description. The viewpoint thereby describes, which architectural concepts should be visualized in which way. The creation of views that consistently represent the enterprise architecture (EA) from a specific viewpoint, is a challenge of ongoing interest in EA management. In this paper, we present a technique that can be used to create views consistent to arbitrary architecture viewpoints and show, how this technique is realized in a prototypic tool. Central constituents of the tool are a model providing the graphical primitives for describing visualizations (called visualization model) and a model-to-model transformation reifying an architectural viewpoint.