Christian Neubert

Wiki4EAM: using hybrid wikis for enterprise architecture management

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a challenging task, modern enterprises have to face. This task is often addressed via heavy-weight and expensive EAM tools to collect, structure, visualize and analyze architectural information. A major problem in EAM is the mismatch between the existing unstructured information sources and the rigid information structures and collaboration mechanisms provided by todays EAM tools.

A Lightweight Approach to Enterprise Architecture Modeling and Documentation

Not quite a few enterprise architecture (EA) management endeavors start with the design of an information model covering the EA-related interests of the various stakeholders. In the design of this model, the enterprise architects resort to prominent frameworks, but often create what would be called an “ivory tower” model. This model at best case misses if not ignores the knowledge of the people that are responsible for business processes, applications, services etc. In this paper, we describe how the wisdom of the crowds can be used to develop information models. Making use of Web 2.0 techniques, wikis, and an open templating mechanism, our approach ties together the EA relevant information in a way, which is accessible to both humans and applications. We demonstrate how the ivory tower syndrome can be cured, typical pitfalls can be avoided, and employees can be empowered to contribute their expert knowledge to EA modeling and documentation.

Fostering Collaborative and Integrated Enterprise Architecture Modelling

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is a challenging task in modern enterprises. Tools supporting EA management activities are based on extensive models either created by enterprise architects or built-in. However, these models cannot be adapted according to specific data acquisition needs by persons having the architectural knowledge on the instance level. In this article, we describe how Hybrid Wikis empower these information carriers and enterprise architects to collaboratively and incrementally develop and manage a model in a bottom-up fashion by using wiki pages enriched with types and attributes. We visualise these emergent models by using UML-like class diagrams. Our approach is evaluated in a case study in a global operating bank participating in our Wiki4EAM community, a community of German enterprise architects applying Hybrid Wikis in different EA management contexts.

Data model driven implementation of web cooperation systems with Tricia

We present the data modeling concepts of Tricia, an opensource Java platform used to implement enterprise web information systems as well as social software solutions including wikis, blogs, file shares and social networks. Tricia follows a data model driven approach to system implementation where substantial parts of the application semantics are captured by domain-specific models (data model, access control model and interaction model). In this paper we give an overview of the Tricia architecture and development process and present the concepts of its data model: plugins, entities, properties, roles, mixins, validators and change listeners are motivated and described using UML class diagrams and concrete examples from Tricia projects. We highlight the benefits of this data modeling framework for application developers (expressiveness, modularity, reuse, separation of concerns) and show its impact on userrelated services (content authoring, integrity checking, link management, queries and search, access control, tagging, versioning, schema evolution and multilingualism). This provides the basis for a comparison with other model based approaches to web information systems.

Functional Analysis of Enterprise 2.0 Tools: A Services Catalog

In recent years a new class of integrated web-based enterprise tools emerged facilitating team collaboration and knowledge management. In this paper we provide a detailed analysis of their concepts and services. We examined the following commercial and open source Enterprise 2.0 tools in detail: Alfresco Share, Atlassian Confluence, GroupSwim, Jive SBS, Liferay Social Office, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Socialtext, Tricia. Thereby, we derived an unifying multi-dimensional classification and evaluation framework. For each dimension we identified several technical criteria to characterize the functional capabilities of a given tool. Based on this schema we conduct a detailed evaluation for each particular tool. This work contributes to a better technical understanding of this emerging family of enterprise applications, highlights strengths and weaknesses of existing tools and identifies areas for further system research and development.

Multi-faceted context-dependent knowledge organisation with TACKO

Purely hierarchical classification schemes such as taxonomies have been the primary means for knowledge organization for millennia and are still predominant in current information systems, for example in the form of hierarchical menus or folder hierarchies. However, due to the growing amount of digital information as well as improved technical possibilities, other organization schemes such as faceted classification schemes or so-called folksonomies, the result of social tagging activity, recently gained popularity. While these approaches address particular shortcomings of purely hierarchical organization of information, they exhibit certain characteristics limiting their general applicability. In this paper, we first give an overview of the particular strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to knowledge organization. Subsequently, we present a formal model of TACKO, a novel organization scheme that is inspired by the flexibility of tagging systems, i.e., the assignment of keywords to information resources, and incorporates elements of hierarchical and faceted organization schemes, so it can be considered a synthesis of the aforementioned schemes. We illustrate TACKO using a small example scenario. Additionally, we present a user interface for our approach, that we implemented in a modern web-based collaboration software.

Structuring folksonomies with implicit tag relations

Tagging systems allow users to assign arbitrary text labels (i.e., tags) to various types of resources, such as photos or web pages, to facilitate future retrieval and selective sharing of contents. The resulting system of classification is referred to as a folksonomy. The uncontrolled nature of tags leads to inconsistencies in the usage of terms which impairs the utility of the system. Approaches to this problem that map tags to concepts of external knowledge representations, such as ontologies, are often inapplicable since they require that corresponding concepts exist and that they reflect the meaning of tags as intended by the users. In this paper, we present the notion of implicit tag relations. Our aim is to improve the accessibility of contents in tagging systems without significantly reducing the flexibility and universal applicability of tags. Instead of explicitly relating tags to each other, we propose to give users the ability to retroactively alter folksonomies by changing the tags of many resources with a single operation. This way, the usage of tags can be harmonized and it can be controlled how they are used in combination. We highlight the benefits of our approach compared to explicit tag relations and discuss important implications as well as its limitations.

Facilitating Structuring of Information for Business Users with Hybrid Wikis

The flexibility and general applicability of wikis make them a valuable tool for information management and collaboration in modern enterprises. Since information in traditional wikis is only stored in form of unstructured text pages, the way it can be accessed by users is limited to fulltext search and navigation along the links in wiki pages. Some wikis try to overcome this limitation by allowing users to enrich text with semantic annotations, usually being defined in semantic web ontologies. While this provides database-like querying capabilities, it requires that business users learn a specific syntax and understand modelling concepts they are not familiar with.