Archimate applications data objects
ArchiMate is an open‑standard, visual modeling language for enterprise architecture, developed and maintained by The Open Group’s ArchiMate Forum. Its mission is to enable architects to describe, analyze, and visualize the relationships across business processes, organizational structures, information flows, IT systems, and infrastructure. This is done using a common, lean notation of around 50 core concepts, deliberately designed to be simpler and more accessible than UML or BPMN.
ArchiMate is a vendor‑neutral Open Architecture framework that aligns with TOGAF and enables multi-layer modeling, i.e. covering strategy, business, application, technology, and physical layers. TOGAF, also maintained by The Open Group, is the most widely used enterprise architecture framework, covering governance, design, planning, and implementation. In that context, Archimate is the modeling language that complements TOGAF by visually representing architecture layers and relationships.
ArchiMate has a structured and layered approach to modeling, and while it’s not a full-fledged data modeling language like ER diagrams, it does offer essential constructs to model data, specifically to support enterprise architecture decision-making. At the Application Layer, data objects represent a discrete unit of information implemented, used, produced, or persisted by applications.
Note that there is no built-in support in Archimate for attributes, cardinality, or normalization like in ER models.
When it comes to data, it uses data objects to describe containers, entities and their relationships.
Since v8.3.0, Hackolade Studio allows you to generate Archimate-compliant files with applications data objects for your Hackolade Studio data models. To be clear, Hackolade Studio does not cover any of the many other layers of the Archimate specification -- only applications data objects -- so they can be imported in specialized tools such as Archi, Bizzdesign, Mega, LeanIX, etc.
This feature is only available in the editions: Professional, Workgroup, Free Trial, and Community.
Archimate application data objects file
Hackolade Studio generates a .archimate file, in XML format. This file format can be opened by tools such as the open-source Archi tool.
Archimate Open Exchange file
The Open Exchange file format is tailored for third party tools that are Archimate-aware to exchange data structures, paradigms, concepts, etc...This format is also an XML structure that is quite close to the .archimate internals. It uses UTF-8 encoding (e.g. support special characters). The main difference is that the organization of the objects is separated from the objects declaration themselves.