Schemas and Messages

Industry standards are important in all architecture domains, but they are particularly important in Information Architecture. Information is typically exchanged between organizations and between divisions of an organization. To facilitate the exchange of information, industry bodies and other groups have spent considerable time and effort defining standards in the form of industry and domain specific schemas that codify the way that information should be represented and transmitted between interested parties. These schemas can be large and unwieldy but provide a necessary and often regulated method of exchanging information between disparate parties.

Enterprise Architect can be used to assist an architect when working with these industry schemas, and it has a number of tools including the Schema Composer that will make it easy to work with the schemas and create and maintain compliant messages. The Schema Composer can be used to shield the information architect or designer from the details of the schema but will allow them to create and view schema compliant messages. Quite typically the information that an organization wants to share will be a small subset of the information addressed by the entire schema; Enterprise Architect allows a modeler to create messages based on a subset of the schema and in a variety of standards, including JSON, XSD and RDF Schemas.

Learn More: The Schema Composer