Archimate

ArchiMate is an open and independent enterprise architecture modeling language developed and maintained by The Open Group. It is designed to describe, analyze, and visualize the relationships among the different domains of an enterprise, providing a consistent representation across business, application, and technology layers. ArchiMate supports modeling of motivation elements such as drivers, goals, and requirements, as well as implementation and migration elements that bridge strategy and execution.

The language is organized around layers and aspects. The core layers are Business, Application, and Technology, while the aspects are Active Structure, Behavior, and Passive Structure. This structure enables the representation of entities such as business actors and roles (Active Structure), processes and services (Behavior), and data objects or artifacts (Passive Structure). ArchiMate defines a set of relations—such as uses, realizes, assigns, and influences—that establish traceable links across elements and layers, supporting coherent end-to-end architecture descriptions.

ArchiMate provides a comprehensive set of viewpoints to address diverse stakeholder concerns, ranging from business process and information flow views to technology infrastructure and migration views. The language is designed to be interoperable with other frameworks, most notably The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), and supports model-driven analysis for impact assessment, gap analysis, and migration planning. Tool support for ArchiMate is widespread, with both commercial and open-source options, along with community resources and example models.

In summary, ArchiMate offers a standardized, semantically defined notation for modeling enterprise architectures, enabling clear communication, consistent analysis, and alignment between business and IT across multiple layers and perspectives.