Investigating the mapping of an Enterprise Description Language into UML 2.0

Business architects and process engineers, when modelling their organisation or parts of it, prefer not to use the Unified Modelling Language (UML) as they find UML too technical for their taste. Instead they use their own modelling languages, which are more intuitive for formulating business-oriented models. As these techniques are often less formalized or widely used, tool support is usually inadequate or even totally absent. Furthermore, in view of the need to relate such business models to existing or possibly future ICT systems and architecture, the non-UML business models have to be integrated with the UML models commonly used in the ICT domain. A concrete case of this is the enterprise architecture language developed by the ArchiMate project. This paper describes a mapping of this language onto UML 2.0. On the one hand, this mapping is needed to concretize the relation between models of the business and ICT domains. On the other hand, this mapping will provide the basis for developing a UML profile for the ArchiMate language, facilitating the use of UML tools for making ArchiMate models. In this way, one is able to compensate the disadvantages of writing business models in a non-UML language.