ArchiMate and DEMO - Mates to Date?

ArchiMate is an approach to modeling the architecture of enterprises. In the corresponding architecture framework, three enterprise layers are distinguished: business, application and technology. Although ArchiMate is broadly applied in practice, its semantics appears to be undefined. DEMO is a methodology for enterprise engineering that is facing a rapidly growing acceptance. It is firmly rooted in a sound and appropriate theoretical basis. DEMO also distinguishes between three enterprise layers: ontological, infological and datalogical. This paper reports on a theoretical and practical comparative evaluation of ArchiMate and DEMO. Only the business layer of ArchiMate and the ontological layer of DEMO are considered. Three conclusions are drawn. First, the two approaches are hardly comparable since ArchiMate belongs to the second and DEMO to the third wave of approaches. Second, the business layer of ArchiMate corresponds to all three layers of DEMO, without a possibility to distinguish between them. Third, ArchiMate could benefit from adopting DEMO as its front-end approach, thereby enforcing the rigorously defined semantics of DEMO on the Archimate models.