Absolutely, the ability to customise the views is fundamental to the Essential Viewer. To do this, you update the View template for this view, which is defined using an XSL document contained in the Essential Viewer web application. All the business-related Views can be found in the 'business' folde...

What you have described in terms of how you've modelled this sounds sensible. However, the things you've described as Domains sound to me like coarser-grained business capabilities. A capability can contain sub-capabilities, so you can be as coarse-grain or as fine-grain as you need to be. Remember,...

The memory settings for Protege and for Tomcat are separate. On Windows, you can set Protege by going into the Protege File->Preferences and then into Property Files and then into the LAX properties tab. In there, find the lax.nl.java.option.heap.size.max property and increase this to around 1024MB ...

Yes. The Strategy Management area of the Essential Meta Model has a construct called 'Architecture State' that you can use to define a particular state of the architecture, with associated time parameters. I would recommend using these to define states that describe particular aspects of the archite...

In theory no. Like any such repository, the system resources of the platform on which you are running it will act as a constraint - both in terms of memory and processor power. However, using 64-bit Java and maximum memory of 2GB and above provides plenty. Within the 2GB RAM config, we have an Essen...

Sometimes, the Graph Widget that we use in Protege doesn't keep with these sorts of thing and I appreciate that this drawing error is annoying but you can work around it as follows. You can change the name directly on the object (without opening it's form) and this sets the name in the form, too. If...

Hi Yasmin, Yes, there is a powerful meta model for defining and capturing the cost values of anything in the model. We found that capturing cost values directly for any particular element in the model (e.g. Business Process or Application Provider) could easily be misleading. Therefore, we have prov...

Hi Manny, Great to hear that you're making good progress. To capture the Organisation Model, we use Group Actors (for teams/divisions) and Individual Actors for the real people in each team. We can use the Group Actor for things as small as a particular team or as large as the organisation itself - ...

Hi Kevin. The approach you've taken is still supported and you can continue with that. However, we found that there are scenarios where this wasn't clear enough and in particular when we needed to define Lifecycle Models, having the lifecycle status being used to defined standards was overloading th...

Please see Neil's post here.

It shouldn't make a difference but it could be worth trying. This work-around does resolve the ClassNotFoundException during the server binding to RMI Registry. Let me ask a silly question. :) You do have a copy of the protege.jar file in the root of that other HTTP server and the server is running?...

There is no talk-back required. The tab only waits for an HTTP success message from the server. The Out of memory error is likely to be causing the problem. If you're seeing it in the Protege console window, this is in your Protege client. To resolve this, see this documentation from the Protege Wik...

Hi Kirk, I'm going to start with things that you've probably already thought of. ;-) The Essential Viewer environment needs to be running for the Architecture Reporting Tab to be able to send the repository snapshot to it. Make sure that Viewer is running on your local machine (as you're using local...

Yes, things worked to set up the DB in client mode. Converting the project to a DB project was successful, and the DB was populated - I went in using the DB client to check to see if the tables had anything in them. So, everything is good as far as setting up the database - to my knowledge. Excelle...

Although there's a database exception in there, which could be at the heart of this, there's a class not found error during the bind to the server. So, let's try the work-around for the Java RMI issue that appeared in Java 1.6.0-29 and see if that works: Protege team posting This Essential forum pos...

I forgot to mention that I am using SQLfire as my DB I'm not sure SQLfire is supported by Protege. In terms of what is supported, it should be any JDBC-compliant database but we know there are problems with Oracle and DB2. The Protege team run nightly tests against MySQL and PostgreSQL. Start by ru...

Hi Barry, Unfortunately, the log file has not been attached to your post. You could post the relevant lines from the log files into a reply here - it shouldn't be too big. Things to check for: - You have configured the metaproject correctly and the path to the project file (.PPRJ) is correct. As we ...

Hi, I have used an older version of EAM about 2 years ago. Instead of upgrading, I intend to perform a clean installation and proceed from there. I was wondering if someone has a virtual appliance with the full software stack that can be distributed? Ideally, a vagrant setup would be great, possibl...

Great points. These are actually Business Capabilities as ultimately, you would define and use business processes to perform these activities. In terms of being able to group these together (so that we don't lose them amongst the other business capabilities), we can map them to the IT Business Domai...

Hi Manny, Sounds like some good progress. I'm not sure that we have a Strategic Plan catalogue view in the OOTB set, although it would fairly straightforward to create one based on any of the OOTB catalogues - just that you'd be listing instances of the Strategic_Plan (and it's sub-types) class. Pro...

Hi The metamodel in version 4.0.1 has business_capabilities, application_capabilities and technology_capabilities Just wondering why an Information_Capability class does not exist. Great question. Really the Information Concept provides the Information Layer equivalent of Business Capabilities, Tec...

This is something that is now on our roadmap. I think we'll take an iterative approach, build up the capability of the web front end as required rather than trying to everything all at once. One of the Team members had a look at Web Protege very recently and this works in a very similar way. It's a ...

Thanks!

This is great news, indeed!

Hi Manny. Although each View template has different sections (which means that we can't use a single common XSL template to control these), we use the same approach on all of them. A simple tweak to the Views that are being a nuisance can switch the ones that are less important to be OFF by default....

Thanks for this. Great to hear about how you're using Essential. Just so I get a better picture, how long is the typical project-load-time? Is it comparable when running on a standalone workstation or is the multi-user mode significantly slower? To answer your question, the answer is a qualified 'ye...

Hi All, I've had a chance to play around with the suggestions you have said. I am slightly confused as to which sections in the class hierarchy I am supposed to be filling. Do you have a manual or a simple tutorial I can follow to implement the suggestions you made. In theory it all makes sense, bu...

Thanks for the detailed reply Jonathan, highly appreciated. Could you please provide me with any documentation or a link to the JavaScript widget to create this custom view? Kind Regards Manny I think the main ones to look at would be JVectorMap: http://jvectormap.owl-hollow.net and also InfoVis: h...

If you've installed GraphViz to the default location (just run the installer), you should not have to modify the GRAPHVIZ_DOT env variable. However, this could be a problem with your Process models. Have you got a "Start" node on the diagram for the Process Flow, connected to the first ste...

Thanks for your efforts, Hunter

There's a Version 4 demo repository (upgraded demo 3.5 with some fixes) available to download from our share area.

Jonathan

Yes, we're about to release another minor version that hopefully has picked up all of these!

Do let us know if you find any more!

Jonathan

On your first question, I think I would create a new Information View called "Customer Preferred Address" and map it to the relevant Customer and Address Data Objects (which will be related as Data Attribute types in the Customer object). In terms of where the contextual information about ...

Hi Manny, Great question. The idea is that we define WHAT is going to be changed in the architecture using the Strategic Plans and it's against these Plans that the planning action - such as you mention (decommission) - are defined. In the definition of the Strategic Plan (which can be as fine-grain...

We've just released a new version of the sample repository that is configured to support Essential Viewer 4.0 It's a bit light on content in the technology layer than we'd like at this stage but does drive a lot of the Views and shows the approach and patterns for modelling in Protege. More to come ...

A quick update on this thread. A new version of the sample repository that is configured for Essential Viewer 4 is now available to download from the Share area . It is bit light in the technology end, still but it provides some good examples of how to model and how some of the Views look. More to c...

Can you confirm a couple of details, please? You mention that you're using demo 3.5, which version of the Essential Viewer are you using? Have you downloaded version 4.0.1 NOTE: This is NOT related to the version of Protege (3.4.8) that you have quoted. Also, could you confirm which view you are try...

Thanks for this.
Looks like a simple typo in the header of the XSL of the view template.

We'll get this sorted out

Jonathan

Although there is some visual modelling within the Protege environment, we take a different - knowledge-based - approach in the Essential project. We are notation independent and most of the modelling is about using simple forms to define the elements of your architecture and then related them to ea...

Let me add a couple more things to this. It's important that when the installer asks you for the location for the Viewer and the Import Utility that you specify the path to and including webapps folder (if you're using Tomcat). Other Java App Servers don't deploy WARs to a folder with this name, so ...

Good point - and SVG through PlantUML is what we will be moving to. When we released the current UML views, I think we were having some issues with PlantUML rendering SVG. The other issue is that although all modern browsers now support SVG (including Internet Explorer at last) we still have many re...

Hi, The PDF button on this view renders the contents of the table underneath the graphical view to a PDF document. This table shows the business services that each part of the organisation produce. The graphical view at the top of the page is designed to be interactive rather than something to print...

We've released a new version of Essential Viewer that will resolve these issues.
The new version is available in the updated 'essentialinstall4.jar' installer. Download and run this new installer, selecting only the Essential Viewer component.

Jonathan

Hi Tham,

We've released a new version of Essential Viewer that will resolve these issues.
The new version is available in the updated 'essentialinstall4.jar' installer. Download and run this new installer, selecting only the Essential Viewer component.

Jonathan

From the error message, it seems you are publishing the Version 3 demo to a Version 4 installation. This is the same bug as raised here . We are working on a patch release for the Version 4 viewer to resolve the specific error that you are seeing - which is related to a small bug introduced when the...

Thanks Peter!

The upgrade pack (from version 3 repositories to version 4) and a patch for Viewer 4 should be available very shortly.

Jonathan

OK, there were 2 broken links on the homepage that are now fixed.

Thanks again

Jonathan

Thanks for pointing this out.

Ah, I see there's a broken link there. We'll get that sorted - and please do let us know if you find any more!



Jonathan

Thanks for raising this one. The issue is down to a missing statement in some of these related files for the namespace that used for the internationalisation framework. We've checked and actually there are a few files that are affected, so we will resolve this and issue a version 4.0.1 of Essential ...

Yes.

Judging by the timestamp on this post, the site was still unavailable at this time. I've just made some further adjustments and you should now be able to download essentialinstall4.jar

Jonathan

Apologies for this. We had to take the site down for security reasons.

Please see the note on the homepage - all is back now. However, please do let us know if you find any broken links or similar.

Jonathan

Thanks for posting.

The how to install tutorial covers this but the default details are:

user: [email protected]
password: admin

You can then go into the setup of the import utility and define new users and admin accounts.

Jonathan

This view hasn't made it into the current release of the Version 4 Essential Viewer (just as it did not make it into version 3), which is why the menu item was disabled. That it was available to enable is a configuration bug in the Essential 3 baseline repository. Having said that, we'll look into a...

Thanks for this one.

All the demo version 3 has a version 3.5 meta model, it will not work properly with the Version 4 viewer as it has not got the correct viewer configuration.

However, we'll get the version 4 demo repository out in the next few days.

Jonathan

Thanks for posting this error.

We've just released some updated versions of this and some associated views in the Version 4 release but we'll check whether this is still an issue.

Jonathan

No, leave the Default Architecture State out. There will be no side affects.

On reflection, this architecture state does not really do anything for you - other than cause these sorts of problems and it has been removed from the Essential Meta Model version 4.

Jonathan

In the next release, the following Business Component Model views will be available out of the box: Business Objective / Change Footprint. This provides a heatmap on the BCM that compares the footprint of current change activities (i.e. programmes/projects) against the business objectives that have ...

A version 3 sample repository is now available to download

Jonathan

A new sample repository for Essential 3 is now available to download in the share area

Jonathan

We have just release a new sample repository that includes some simple roadmaps and plans.

Jonathan

Updated script file now available in the Share area.

Jonathan

As an alternative approach to removing these instances In Protege: 1. Go into Strategy Management and then Architecture State in EA_Support 2. Select the Architecture State called 'Default EA Architecture State' and delete it. 3. Now run the deleteAllInstances() script. It's still worth using step 3...

I've created a new version of the script and done some testing with around 4000 instances. The issue seems to be that the instances we want to delete are mapped to an Architecture State - and if it's the Default Architecture State, that's an instance with links to a very large number of other instan...

Thanks for the feedback and for trying out just deleting a specific number. Very interesting that even if you delete 100 instances Protege is having trouble. I've spent a lot of time, previously, looking at memory management in Python (Jython) and there really is nothing that you can do explicitly -...

I've published an updated version of the script.

You now have to specify the size of the chunk to use, e.g.
deleteAllInstances("Business_Process", 100)

Let me know how you get on - I've just deleted 1350 instances in a second or so.

Jonathan

You could push the heap a bit more on 32-bit Windows, to: 1470m (1541406720) but your idea makes more sense.

I'll tweak the script to delete in user-defined chunks, so you can experiment with how many you can remove in one go.

Jonathan

Thanks for your interest. This ECP isn't going to make Essential Meta Model 4.0 but most likely will start as an optional pack for EMM 3.0.x and 4.0. Does this cover your requirements or is there anything missing in the proposed extension? We still have this ECP open for requirements gathering but p...

Yes, it will be released in the Share area in the Sample Repositories section

Jonathan

I've uploaded a Python script that you can run in the Protege Script Console tab that should help here. I've just tested it with over 3400 Business Processes and all completed in a matter of a few seconds.

Let me know if this helps

Jonathan

Hi, I have seen this but it really depends on which Class of instances that you're deleting. Classes with many inverse-slots (bi-directional relationships) are typically the ones causing problems. As a bit of background, this happens because Protege is having trouble processing all the update events...

Thanks for resolving this and reporting back. We'll get that resolved and into the next release.

Jonathan

Hi, The idea in Essential Architecture Manager is that you don't ever draw your diagrams - they are generated automatically by the Essential Viewer by querying the contents of the repository. The only 'sort-of' exceptions to this are where we use a simple, notation agnostic, graphical models for thi...

We'll take a look at that but we have been using the UML models successfully on Windows for some time.

Is this causing a problem, failure to render the UML models or would you like to report a potential issue / inconsistency?

Thanks

Jonathan

Good post. In a similar way to how we treat software in the application layer, we hand over to suitable database design tools when it comes to actual table design. These designs (somewhat confusingly called Physical Models by many DBAs and data architects) are detailed implementation designs that fr...

We are working on a demo that covers all layers but currently, it lacks enough content in the Technology area.

Would a demo that covers business, some information and application areas be helpful in the meantime?

Jonathan

Interesting point. SAML certainly has the technology aspect but maybe that's the 'right' name for an Application Provider that provides the behaviour of serving identities to querying systems using the SAML technology format /protocol. It's usually best to use the names of the Application Providers ...

Thanks for posting this!
This view looks excellent.

Jonathan

Thanks for this. In terms of defining those building blocks, we can define these at two levels of abstraction for technology things and then re-use these to describe the technology platforms for the Application Providers. These two levels are both in the logical layer: - Technology Composite which d...

Thanks for posting back.
Great to hear.

We've got that fixed properly in the next release of Essential Viewer

Thanks for this, Jacek Yes, the original idea with this template was to be quite fuzzy about how 'the same' element in two repositories should be identified. However, you have pointed out a very good case where this simply doesn't work. Your suggestions are good to use alternative matching functions...

I forgot to mention that there is a work-around for this bug. What you need to do is tell the Application Server (e.g. Tomcat) to accept UTF-8 in the HTTP GET messages. By default, HTTP GET requests are received encoded in ISO-8859-1, so even though the rest of the application is Unicode-enabled, th...

We've been following the development of Web Protege for the last couple of years for exactly these purposes. When we last checked, however, there were some shortcomings that meant that it was not compatible at the moment. We will continue to track WebProtege, though, and let you if / when it becomes...

Thanks for posting about this. We have also just found and now resolved this in the forthcoming release of the Essential Viewer, which takes an improved approach for the page history - including proper support for UTF-8. The fix updates both the Essential Viewer Engine and the page history rendering...

We're aiming for a Q1 release this year and are working on which views will be in that release, out-of-the-box. I can't be more specific than that at the moment about when.

What I will do is find out which business heat map views will be available in that release and get back to you here.

Jonathan

I've resolved this problem by re-working the transform XSLT file and tested it with the source XML files that you kindly provided. Thanks for raising this bug, as the new transform has resolved a lot of potential issues with processing arbitrary string content from the XML source. All that's require...

The inverse slot won't actually help do the recursive query, although it will enable you to query against the next level down. For example, you would build a query that finds all the Technology Capabilities that have the '1.1' capability in the inverse slot (e.g. containing_technology_capability) an...

Thanks for your post. I'm going to start with a question: When you say: When I query all components that realise the Capability A (group one), it returns nothing? do you mean within Protege or in Essential Viewer? Normally, this kind of query is something that we include in the Views in Essential Vi...

Thanks for confirming this. I'm looking at the XSL transform ('importEssentialInstances.xsl') which should be able to resolve this. As some background, the transform dynamically builds Python script, which needs some special treatment for UTF-8 characters. I'll post back as soon as I have some progr...

I've tried both XML documents and I get the same result in the repository - which is the same as Screenshot 2 I think the answer to this is probably in the 'importEssentialInstances.xsl' transform rather than the tab itself. We'll look into this and get back to you as soon as we can. Thanks very muc...

Thanks for the update.
I'll take a look at the ZIP file and get back to you about a way forward.

Jonathan

Yes, that's what we've been doing. It does mean that there are a lot of these Service Quality Values in the repository but it works well and from a meta model point of view is consistent in terms of using these both for what our objectives and targets might be and also for the actual values that we ...

Just a quick post to let you know that version 2.0 of the Essential Integration Tab is now available to download from the Share area.

Jonathan

Proposed Solution Extend the 'stakeholders' relationship between on all EA_Class elements from a straight relationship to either Business_Role or ACTOR_TO_ROLE_RELATION. The extension will define a new STAKEHOLDER_RELATION class that is connected to the 'stakeholders' slot on EA_Class and to the AC...

Requirements The requirement is to provide the ability to capture a model describing the management interest for any element in the repository, e.g. Business Process, Application Provider, Application Service, Product. A common example of the aspects of a Management Interest Model would be RACI, wh...

Complete ECP
We have been testing the implementation of this ECP in the field and believe it is ready for wider use.

This Lifecycle Model extension is planned to be included in the next release of the Essential Meta Model.

Thanks for the update. We often move the metaproject (which is the Protege project that controls the server configuration) to a more easily maintained location, e.g. alongside our main repository, on Windows, perhaps something like 'D:/EssentialRepository/' However, if you do do this, you need to tw...

Does Glass Fish work in the same way as Tomcat with a deployed WAR file? That is, the WAR is unpacked as a folder structure. Some background. In version 3, we introduced some cacheing of the XML repository snapshot to improve performance and provide more consistent memory usage. There are also a num...

Hi Jacek,

We have just finished an updated Essential Integration Tab, that includes a revised integration engine. I will post this in the Share Area tomorrow and hopefully this should sort your UTF-8 character issue

Jonathan

Neil is correct. There are some particular things that you need to do with Python to make it handle UTF-8 or unicode characters. If you know the unicode characters, you can use the /uNNNN approach to specify the character. e.g. here is the Python code to add some details about a Chinese Language: aN...

Apologies, we ran into some more things that we felt needed to be resolved before we released it. A beta version should available very shortly.

Jonathan

Is the name somehow static or is it possible to change it? Is it maybe possible to map it with an id in an excel sheet? This is the 'internal' repository ID that Protege has generated and as long as it is unique in your spreadsheet, it can be any string value. (This example XML is based on the Esse...

Thanks for posting this.

Also make sure that if you're running 64-bit Windows to use the 64-bit Java for Windows.

Jonathan