The next three articles concentrate on the relationships associated with each of the elements in the Business Concept library. Certain relationships apply to each concept and should be understood by EA practitioners. The relationships were stated in the previous articles; this article expands on those aspects.
Structural Concepts – Active structural elements
Business Actor – an organizational entity that is capable of performing behavior. A business actor may be assigned to one or more business roles.
Business Role – a defined responsibility that authorizes an actor to perform actions. A business interface or an application interface may be used by a business role, while a business interface may be part of (assigned to) a business role.
Business Collaboration – an aggregate of two or more business roles that work together to perform collective behavior. A Business Collaboration may be:
- composed of a number of business roles
- assigned to one or more business interactions
- a business interface or an application interface may be used by a Business Collaboration
- a business collaboration may have business interfaces (through the composition relationship)
Business Interface – a point of access where a business service is made available to the environment. A business interface may be:
- part of a business role through a composition relationship
- used by a business role
- assigned to one or more business services, which means that these services are exposed by the interface.
Location – where in physical space actors reside. A location can be:
- assigned to a structural element.
- assigned to a behavior element, to indicate where the behavior is performed.
Passive structural elements
Business Object – an element of a system upon which the system operates. Business objects may:
- be accessed by a business process, function, a business interaction, a business event, or a business service.
- have association, specialization, aggregation, or composition relationships with other business objects.
- be realized by a representation or by a data object (or both)
Next time…
Next week’s article follows this subject with examples of the relationships with Business Behavior concepts.
This blog includes extracts of the ArchiMate 2.0 Specification, Copyright © 2009-2012 The Open Group. ArchiMate® is a registered trademark of The Open Group. For the original material please refer to this page.
