Skip to content

Related Work: Nicolas Figay — ArchiMate OWL Formalization

Nicolas Figay is an enterprise interoperability expert whose work on semantic representations of ArchiMate models has been an early and thoughtful contribution to the space. His ArchiMate OWL project explores whether OWL DL axioms can infer and validate relationship validity between ArchiMate element types — a question that anyone working with ArchiMate in RDF eventually encounters.

Repository: github.com/nfigay/archimate.owl
Author articles: Medium — @nfigay

The Project

The repository is described as "experimentation on OWL derivations from ArchiMate, dedicated to usage of reasoning on imported ArchiMate models." It contains multiple OWL files exploring different formalization strategies:

  • ArchiMate 3.0.owl — Core ArchiMate 3.0 formalization in OWL
  • ArchiMate 3 for inferring relations from Open Format exchange files.owl — Extended version with relationship inference rules
  • ArchiMate with Grakn experimentation.owl — Exploration with the Grakn/TypeDB knowledge graph platform
  • XSLT scripts for transforming ArchiMate Open Exchange Format files into RDF

The project explores multiple approaches in parallel, reflecting the genuine difficulty of the problem: there is no single obvious way to map ArchiMate's metamodel semantics into OWL.

The Reasoning Approach

The central question Figay's project explores: can OWL DL axioms encode the ArchiMate relationship validity matrix so that a reasoner can determine which relationships are valid between which elements?

This is a well-motivated question. ArchiMate defines a matrix of allowed source/target type pairs for each relationship type. If this could be expressed as OWL axioms, standard reasoners could check model consistency automatically — no custom validation tooling needed.

Figay's exploration shows that OWL can express some of these constraints via domain/range restrictions and class expressions. The challenge arises from the nature of the ArchiMate matrix: it defines a closed set of allowed pairs ("these combinations are valid, everything else is not"). OWL operates under the open-world assumption — the absence of an axiom permitting a combination doesn't make it invalid. For closed-world constraint validation, the semantic web stack provides SHACL and ShEx, which are purpose-built for this.

Figay's work predates the widespread adoption of SHACL (which became a W3C Recommendation in 2017), so the OWL-based approach was a reasonable path to explore at the time. Projects that came later — including linked.archi and Mendoza's ontology — benefit from SHACL's availability and use it for exactly this purpose: closed-world validation of the relationship matrix.

The Interoperability Vision

Beyond the technical OWL formalization, Figay's articles on semantic cartography and linked enterprises articulate an important framing: different architecture tools export different representations, and a shared semantic foundation is needed for meaningful interchange. His perspective comes from years of work in enterprise interoperability standards and PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) integration.

This framing — that architecture models should be first-class citizens in the linked data ecosystem — resonates broadly. The problem of tool-specific silos and lossy interchange formats is well-known to anyone working across multiple architecture tools. Linked.archi shares this vision, treating architecture models as knowledge graphs that integrate across modeling languages and toolchains.

The Grakn/TypeDB Exploration

The inclusion of a Grakn (now TypeDB) exploration is notable. It demonstrates that the challenge of representing ArchiMate metamodel constraints is not specific to RDF/OWL — it exists in any knowledge representation system. The modeling decisions (how to represent qualified relationships, how to enforce type constraints) are more fundamental than the choice of graph platform.

Key Insights from This Work

  • The ArchiMate relationship validity matrix is inherently a closed-world constraint, which creates tension with OWL's open-world semantics. This is a genuine design challenge, not a limitation of any particular project.

  • Transforming ArchiMate Open Exchange Format files into RDF is a practical and valuable capability for integrating architecture models with other enterprise knowledge.

  • The multi-approach exploration (pure OWL, OWL + inference, alternative platforms) reflects honest engagement with a hard problem rather than premature convergence on a single solution.

References