Using XML Transformations for Enterprise Architectures

In this paper we report on the use of XML transformations in the context of Enterprise Architectures. We show that XML transformation techniques can be applied to visualize and analyze enterprise architectures in a formal way. We propose transformational techniques to extract views from an XML document containing architectural information and indicate how to perform a specific form of impact analysis on this information. The transformations are formally expressed with the language RML, a compact yet powerful transformation language developed at CWI, which obtains its power from regular expressions defined on XML documents. We discuss a tool that has been built on top of it to visualize the results of the transformations and illustrate the advantages of our approach: the genericity of XML, the application of a single technique (namely XML transformations) for various tasks, and the benefits of having a model viewer which is in complete ignorance of the architectural language used.