MOF Diagrams - what use are they?

[Paolo F Cantoni]

I can see from the EA Help what a MOF diagram is, but what use is it in the EA context?  Can I use it to define new types of Classifiers for example?  I want to define a new type of Classifier called a Term (as part of an Ontological Modelling MDG).

The best I can do so far is to create a stereotyped Class - which doesn't do what I need as it's still a Class not a Term.  I want to mimic what Sparx did when they created Requirements, Changes & Feature elements etc...

Has anybody ever created a MOF diagram?  What did you use it for?

TIA,
Paolo

[salayande]

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

[Paolo F Cantoni]

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

Hi Segun,

Do you mean MOF diagrams or the creation of new t_object Types?

Paolo

[salayande]

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

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Hi Segun,

In that case, I'll contact you off-line and then we can put stuff back on-line if appropriate.

Look out for an IM/email from me.

Paolo

[salayande]

OK

[jakob]

I can see from the EA Help what a MOF diagram is, but what use is it in the EA context?  Can I use it to define new types of Classifiers for example?  I want to define a new type of Classifier called a Term (as part of an Ontological Modelling MDG).

The best I can do so far is to create a stereotyped Class - which doesn't do what I need as it's still a Class not a Term.  I want to mimic what Sparx did when they created Requirements, Changes & Feature elements etc...

Has anybody ever created a MOF diagram?  What did you use it for?

TIA,
Paolo

I'm looking for an answer to this question, too. Is there no answer available, yet?