Messages

106

General Board / Re: MOF Diagrams - what use are they?

« on: April 08, 2010, 05:34:05 am »

Hi Paolo,
I am interested in the Ontological MDG Add-In. I have been exploring the development of information models (a type of Ontology) based on taxonomic relationships, an approach that may be found in IBM's Information Framework (IFW) and implemented in industry reference models, FSDM (Finance) and the IAA (Insurance, recently donated to the ACORD industry standard organization).

The IFW approach is a departure from the traditional subject area ( entity clustering) approach from Information Engineering (James Martin et al).

The IFW defines a Taxonomy of business terms and uses these to develop concept models (Ontology -- corresponds to an Upper Ontology layer in the academic literature).

I have been exploring the use of the IBM Taxonomy software (A Research Prototype) to extract terms from text for population into EA (this part has not been achieved yet) as a firm basis for developing an ontology.

I am happy with the results I am getting but unfortunately, I lack the programming capability to bring all these concepts together as an MDG Add-In.

A company in the early 1990s created a piece of software called the ModelMaster which had the capability of supporting the IBM IFW by creating the ontology layer from the Terminology layer. I suspect IBM may have bought out the Australian based company called ModelWare.

I am using this concept model to drive the development of a Common Information Model and a Canonical Data Model for a SOA based mediation layer on an Information Bus. It is my firm belief that the archiles heel of SOA and Cloud Computing and other distributed architectures going into the future will be Data Quality from poor semantics management.

A company called EAS (www.enterprise-architecture.com) has developed an open source enterprise architecture software (www.enterprise-architecture.org) based on the Ontology Editor, Protege.

I am interested in any Sparx or other efforts that takes EA forward into the Ontology arena (including the implementation of the OMG ODM UML Profile)

kind regards

Segun

107

General Board / Re: MOF Diagrams - what use are they?

« on: April 07, 2010, 09:24:17 pm »

Never done but I am interested in what you are seeking to achieve. Please, provide more detail.

108

General Board / Re: CRUD matrix

« on: March 30, 2011, 03:10:53 am »

Thank you for the suggestion, Sunshine.

regards

Segun

109

General Board / Re: CRUD matrix

« on: March 22, 2011, 12:20:32 am »

I have requested for this feature for years but was informed that Ineed create an MDG Add-In for this.

Please, kindly raise a feature request for this.

kind regards

Segun

110

General Board / Re: Change control against industry standard model

« on: March 19, 2011, 09:04:56 am »

This scenario applies to most organizations using an industry reference model and so interests me.

Any Sparxian with answers?

Segun

111

General Board / Re: Documenting the Big Picture

« on: December 10, 2009, 07:20:02 am »

The big picture depends on what you consider to be a system. A system could be a software , enterprise or organizations collaborating to serve a common customer as in an airport. In these cases, the big picture suggests a blueprint (application, enterprise or ecology blueprints) in which case you have a number of choices depending on the view you are required to show your target audience. If the view of interest is the functional decomposition of an ERP (as in the BaaN IV and SAP Blueprints), get a copy of the Zachman Add-In and overlay the functions over each other to create the functional blueprint. Given that a business function is a non-sequential view of a business capability, the blueprint should address your concern.

kind regards

Segun

112

General Board / Re: Open Source EA Framework - Started with EA and

« on: February 23, 2010, 05:04:51 am »

I'm interested in this framework for two reasons:

It was developed based on some work in the transportation industry in which I work (Air Transportation). I am developing a Common Information Model which I am seeking to abstract for the end-to-end travel network.

CASE tools while useful for model driven enterprise engineering (MDEE) may deliver greater productivity and benefits when delivered with frameworks that are re-usable and are domain-centric. TRAK is a great start.

I will access the site and investigate how I may contribute.

kind regards

Segun

113

General Board / Re: Saving diagrams in SVG format

« on: January 21, 2010, 03:35:09 am »

Thanks for raising a discussion about this useful feature which some competing solutions do have. I would like to see the HTML Documentation sport SVG capabilities.

A lot of corporate clients that use tools like Telelogic System Architect have found this feature useful.

I raised a feature request on this a few years ago but nothing happened.

Please, raise a feature request.

Segun

114

General Board / How may I debug this VBScript in EA

« on: December 27, 2009, 10:37:44 am »

Dear all,

I started experimenting with the scripts and created one below but it is not doing what I want.

How may I get and use a debugger to correct this script. Can anyone suggest what I have done wrong on this script. Any help is appreciated.

kind regards

Option explicit
sub ChangeElementStereotype()

dim thePackage as EA.Package
set thePackage = Repository.GetTreeSelectedPackage("Test Model")
      if not thePackage is nothing and thePackage.ParentID <> 0 then
      dim i
            Session.Output( "Working on package " & EA.Package.Name)
      'get elements
      dim elements as EA.Collection
      dim currentElement as EA.Element
      set elements = thePackage.Elements
            for i = 0 to elements.Count - 1
                  'get each element
                  set currentElement = elements.GetAt(i)
                  'change stereotype
                  set currentElement.Stereotype = "BusinessEntity"
                  'update element stereotype
                  currentElement.Update()            
            Next
            'refresh elements
            elements.Refresh()
            'report element updated
            Session.Output( "Done!" )
      else
            ' No package selected in the tree
            MsgBox( "This script requires a package to be selected in the Project Browser.")
      end if      
End sub
    

115

General Board / Re: Help Correct Script

« on: December 29, 2009, 09:03:48 pm »

Many thanks to you, T-kouno

regards

Segun

116

General Board / Re: Help Correct Script

« on: December 29, 2009, 02:50:14 am »

Thank you for your quick response, T-kouno, and especially over the Xmas break.

I inserted the line as advised but nothing happened. The updated script now looks like this:

Option explicit
sub ChangeElementStereotype()

dim thePackage as EA.Package
set thePackage = Repository.GetTreeSelectedPackage()
      if not thePackage is nothing and thePackage.ParentID <> 0 then
      dim i
            Session.Output( "Working on package ")
      'get elements
      dim elements as EA.Collection
      dim currentElement as EA.Element
      set elements = thePackage.Elements
            for i = 0 to elements.Count - 1
                  'get each element
                  set currentElement = elements.GetAt(i)
                  set currentElement.Stereotype ="BusinessEntity"
                  set currentElement.StereotypeEx = "BusinessEntity"
              'update element stereotype
                  currentElement.Update
            Next
            'refresh elements
            elements.Refresh()
            'report element updated
            Session.Output( "Done!" )
      else
            ' No package selected in the tree
            MsgBox( "This script requires a package to be selected in the Project Browser.")
      end if      
End sub

Again, thank you for your help.

Segun

117

General Board / Help Correct Script

« on: December 26, 2009, 11:48:21 pm »

Dear all,

I could not get my transformation scripts to do simple tasks in EA so I decided to learn the VBScript in EA.

To learn scripting in VBScript, I created a package with two classes with stereotypes set to the "Boy Soldiers".

I then wrote the script below to change the stereotype values to "BusinessEntity" but when I ran the script, nothing happened. Could anyone suggest what I may do to improve the script. Thank you in anticipation.

Option explicit
'
' The purpose of this script is to change the stereotype of all elements  
' in a selected Package from current value to "BusinessEntity".
'
sub ChangeElementStereotype()

dim thePackage as EA.Package
set thePackage = Repository.GetTreeSelectedPackage()
      if not thePackage is nothing and thePackage.ParentID <> 0 then
      dim i
            Session.Output( "Changing the elements' stereotype" )
      'get elements
      dim elements as EA.Collection
      dim currentElement as EA.Element
      set elements = thePackage.Elements
            for i = 0 to elements.Count - 1
                  'get each element
                  set currentElement = elements.GetAt(i)
                  set currentElement.Stereotype = "BusinessEntity"
                  'update element stereotype
                  currentElement.Update()            
            Next
            'refresh elements
            elements.Refresh()
            'report element updated
            Session.Output( "Done!" )
      else
            ' No package selected in the tree
            MsgBox( "This script requires a package to be selected" )
      end if      
End sub
    

118

General Board / Re: ETOM and Enterprise Architect

« on: December 10, 2009, 06:58:29 am »

Hi Bruce,

TM Forum eTOM, SID and TAM (Reference Business Process, Information and Application Frameworks for the Telecomms industry) is available with Sparxsystems Enterprise Architect (I am not even sure Sparxians themselves are aware of this fact).

The solution you require exists as a product known as NGOSS Contract Factory (holds the blueprints) integrated with the open source AndroMDA for the generation of web services, Java EJB and SQL DDL scripts.

The last time I checked, the company, known as AutoMagicKB had a web site at http://amkb-ngoss.com

You may simply google the name of the company.

You may also obtain the TM Forum OSS through Java (OSS/J) on the Sun web site.

If all you want to do is educate yourself, contact Progress Software to download the DXI Browser (It has the SID installed).

kind regards

Segun

119

General Board / Re: Extending DoDAF-MODAF MDG Technology

« on: October 16, 2009, 04:30:44 pm »

Please, kindly contact Sparxsystems support directly on this. NAF 3 is an important framework in European Defence (NATO) and Aviation (EUROCONTROL).

A feature request has been placed on this topic in the past. Please kindly raise another one.

120

General Board / Re: When will 849 be released?

« on: October 06, 2009, 01:13:00 am »

Geert,

I have a lot of hope for 850. Keep your chin up.

regards

Segun