In IT organizations EA has gone through various cycles of development, just as modeling has! But a new trend is on the way. Our research shows that transition to business architecture (BA) for EA teams is a must and is slowly happening. However existing EA groups struggle to elevate their role to be more business oriented. Why BA, what are the issues, the benefits, the challenges, what are vendors doing, and finally how modeling can play an important role are the key topics of this presentation.

Will discuss the following topics
- MDA and other patterns
- UML and DSLs
- Model Transformations
- The future of UML and related standards

Semantic Interoperability: The Next Model-Driven Integration Challenge

Macro economic trends requiring B2B and A2A integration make data transformations increasingly important. When the MDA initiative was launched early in this decade, its founders predicted that model-driven data transformation would be an important area of growth. This growth has in fact taken place, and has made the process of implementing data transformations faster and less bug-ridden.

The advances of recent years mitigated integration costs, but the costs are still too high, consuming 30-40% of IT budgets. Now it is time to chart the next milestone on the data integration path: improvement in semantic interoperability.

Standards that define common data and message formats contain only one kind of machine-readable metadata, namely metadata about the syntax of the information exchange. Machine-readable syntactic metadata makes it possible for current state-of-the-art data integration tools to generate data transformation code, once the integration analyst has entered a mapping from one format to another into the tool. This represents a genuine advance, since programmers do not have to write the low-level transformation code.

However, regardless of whether machine-readable syntactic metadata is based on EDI, XML, or something else, this metadata does not provide integration tools with a basis to help integration analysts decide *what* the mapping between two formats should be. This is a key reason that the integration work is still so labor intensive. Moreover, misunderstandings about the semantics of data and message definitions lead integration analysts to make subtle errors that can be costly and difficult to track down. Semantic metadata standards help to address these limitations.

This presentation will explain the nature and structure of machine-readable semantic metadata that is now coming on line in standards for the manufacturing and financial services industries and is being increasingly used by ERP systems, opening up possibilities for a new generation of tools that make integration analysts substantially more productive and accurate.

Enterprise Architecture is becoming more and more common, but not necessarily more successful. Too often, vague goals of Business-IT alignment and incomplete understanding of architecture roles and processes lead to vague and undefined deliverables. For architecture to be effective at influencing outcomes, it has to be executed within a framework that generates useful artifacts in support of the development process. Furthermore, the output of one phase of the process needs to be the input to the next, otherwise the artifacts quickly become out-of-date. This session presents a case study of the travel industry. Starting with business models, it follows the architecture process through the analysis and design of semantics, business processes, and services with their interfaces, documents and implementation. The case study uses an integrated set of UML models created with Enterprise Architect by Sparx System which leads to the consistent design of services within an enterprise scope, using enterprise semantics, and traceable all the way from business strategy down to the IT services that implement it.