Crossing the EA Chasm: Re-visioning ArchiMate 3.0 Relations as Verbs

COPYRIGHT © 2016-2017 by Michael Herman, Toronto Canada. All rights reserved.

[Updated: February 6, 2017]

In the article Crossing the EA Chasm: Re-visioning the ArchiMate Specification, I proposed a new architectural framework for re-visioning the current ArchiMate 3.0 Specification.

In this article, I propose using the following list of verbs to either augment or replace the existing ArchiMate relationship names in the Specification and move towards a more humane, more understandable, more usable, and more acceptable language for enterprise architecture.

Table 1. Proposed List of Verbs to Augment or Replace
the Current ArchiMate 3.0 Relationship Names

An interesting observation: Note the verbs that start with “Is*”.  They appear in either the “Source-Target” (ForwardVerb) or the “Target-Source” (ReverseVerb) columns but not both for a given relationship.  This wasn’t deliberate – this is just the way it turned out.  Does this indicate anything about which direction is the natural direction for the relationship to point to?

What do you think of this proposal?  Please post a comment below, email me, or post a reply in the LinkedIn ArchiMate group.

To learn more about the background and history of this proposal, check out:

• Crossing the EA Chasm: Reflections on the Current State of ArchiMate
• Crossing the EA Chasm: Re-visioning the ArchiMate Specification

Best regards,
Michael Herman (Toronto)
Parallelspace Corporation

mwherman@parallelspace.net

*ArchiMate is a registered trademark of The Open Group.