NOTE: Mastering ArchiMate – Edition I is now officially out-of-distribution. Mastering ArchiMate – Edition II has been released on 23 April 2014. Edition III will be out soon.
Please visit the Mastering ArchiMate – Edition II page..
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R&A IT Strategy & Architecture 
Hi Gerben,
Nice work! I’ve only had time to browse through the book and haven’t read it thoroughly yet, but my first impression is very favourable. I don’t always agree with your opinions on e.g. improving the language, and I spotted some misinterpretations here and there, but that’s minor stuff. One point we should perhaps discuss sometime: I disagree with your idea that a service should have a composition relation with a function or process. Services are *abstractions* of internal behaviour, hence the use of the realization relationship in ArchiMate. (btw, the definition of “business service” in the standard is not circular but refers to the generic definition of “service” in sect. 2.2 Core Concepts).
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Thank you for your kind comment, especially coming from you as the ‘father’ of ArchiMate. I’d love to discuss it with you sometime, maybe during LAC 2012?
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Hi, I have read parts of your book now, and it fills a real gap out there, so thanks very much for it. I have a few questions I’d like to bounce off you if you have 5min – do you have a contact address? One initial thing is your decision nopt to comment on tools out there. We are using Sparx EA tool, and would be keen on your thoughts about it – specifically if you have had any issues with how EA interprets Archimate relationships and how they are reflected in the traceability window which is causing us some problems. Thanks again, great book.
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Hello Stuart, thanks for the kind words. I haven’t commented on the tools because I only have experience with a few (4 to be precise). To write reviews on tools takes a lot of time, because you really need to test the tools in depth. In terms of planning, that would have meant not being able to finish before the TOG Barcelona 2012 Conference. But if I ever create a second edition, I might add tool reviews if I can get access to enough of them. Don’t expect that soon (a year at least) as this is all spare time of which I don’t have a lot. I haven’t fully decided yet if I want to add real tool reviews, though, because it really takes a lot of time to do that well and I might want to stay neutral v.a.v. the tool people.
The contact address is in the book: info at masteringarchimate.com
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Thank you, Gerben. I do not have any experience with Archimate and I hope this book will help me get up to speed faster than I could have done by struggling on my own.
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The book PDF’s and the Construction & Use handouts were updated on January 5 because 3 views used illegal relations (they were created in part with ‘proposed’ relations instead of the actual official ArchiMate 2.0 relations).
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I’m being dumb, I want to buy the book but can’t see how too 😦
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You’re not dumb. I am. There was no paypal link on this site (only in the book). It is there now.
If you want to buy the book for professional use, contact me at info (at) masteringarchimate.com. You get an official invoice that way.
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This is an answer to the last message from gerben in http://masteringarchimate.com/2012/10/24/announcing-mastering-archimate-edition-1/#comments. Comments are no more allowed in this thread where I was initially asking something about archimate landscape maps…..
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Thanks gerben for your detailed answer….
In fact there is some (pre open-group) work from M. Lanckhorst about automated creation processes for this kind of viewpoints (see, for example, http://icr.uni.lu/leonvandertorre/papers/caise06.pdf).
I was wondering myself if tools (e.g. bizzdesign) were able to create such viewpointss and/or if they were used by archimate practionners.
You are (what else :)) right when saying that ” …. the choice of what goes in there is often semantical, not grammatical. “. But getting some help from the tools would not be bad.
In fact, It seems the automatic processing of this kind of diagrams is NP-Hard (It relates to matrix co-clustering) and as such is untractable : I guess that the author of the “tractatus ….” would not be happy with that :).
Thanks again for your answer ….
BTW, the picture with the car on your main blog is superb. I wonder if this is a D.S or an I.D
(Still a) debtor.
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OT: The author of the “Tractatus” was at the end of his life pretty negative about the success of the “Tractatus” as his main focus was going beyond it and explaining what was wrong with its approach. People should read the “Investigations” or Hacker’s “Wittgenstein’s Place in 20th Century Analytic Philosophy” which I found particularly good. The “Tractatus” is a nice book but it paints a simplistic picture . Sadly, simplistic pictures are the ones that are most successful. And also sadly, most of the AI-like work is done with ridiculously small sets of data from which then large extrapolations are generated. It is like factoring a small number into primes (which is easy) and then assuming factoring a large number will be just as easy.
It is a DS 21 Injection Électronique Automatique Pallas, or DS 21 IE BW. The view is the south Limburg province in The Netherlands near the Dutch / Belgium / Germany borders intersection.
I want to move the comments here, but there is no easy (nor complete) way to do that on WordPress.
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On Februari 28, 2013, The Open Group published a White Paper, called ArchiMate 2.0 – Understanding the Basics. This White Paper is in fact a slightly amended excerpt from the ArchiMate Basics chapter of my book. See the paragraph on this in the page above.
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Hello Gerben,
I can’t manage to get to your book in any way.
The links are broken for me. Maybe I’m doing something wrong …
Also the book is unavailable on Amazon.
Can you you help me to get a copy?
Besides, I’m happy to give a donation.
Thanks
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Hello Duke,
I checked, it turned out the Amazon page said out of stock because I forgot to update it after the last sale. I just updated it again to available. Note that ordering via Amazon and letting me print and ship is very expensive.
I checked the link to the book on the page above and that is working. It might be that your internet provider (or your company if you try to download from a company network) is blocking either bit.ly or the location where the PDF is. Just try from another place (e.g. home).
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Thank you for your quick response. Indeed, I tried the link from my company’s network.
I will try to download from home, then.
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Hi, I am in the process of reviewing Archimate . Can this be used over a network concurrently by a small number of users say 4?
thanks and regards,
DP
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Hello DP,
ArchiMate is a language (more a grammar, actually). The question you are asking is about the tool you want to use to model ArchiMate.
There are ArchiMate modelling tools that work fine over a network with a small number of users, but then it still depends on your deployment. I would for instance not try to use any graphical tool where you want to be able to precisely manipulate objects via Citrix or other Terminal Services over a network with a high latency (generally a result of a large physical distance) between user and terminal server.
Having said that, most tools that allow multiple users to work on a single model concurrently, I suspect, work fine on a LAN. Even large models should fit snugly in memory of a standard desktop these days, meaning that — if the tool has been programmed well — only on model locking and commits and such, traffic to a back end is necessary. The free Archi tool does not support concurrent editing of a model as far as I know. A tool like BiZZdesign Architect allows for working on shared models without a database server to hold the model (it is just a shared file). I don’t know specifics of the other tools (unless companies ask me to evaluate them 😉 )
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Hi..Amazon UK link for purchase not working (no stock).
To make getting printed copies easier (rather than self printing) could you upload into a print on demand solution like Amazon Createspace or Lulu? Willing to pay a modest premium for a bound POD copy rather €8.99 and then my own printer ink & paper.
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I am not printing new stock for Edition I as I am working on Edition II. I am hoping to set up a well-distributed print edition for a reasonable price if possible.
I had a look at Createspace cost. For Ed 2, which will be roughly 200 pages colour, the list price would have to be €56 for me to get €9. They effectively take 60% of the list price + €1 fee per book + €0.06 fee per page. In other words: I get 15% of what you pay. My experience with Amazon is also not very good. Finding out how much of the list price they get is difficult for instance.
I looked at Kindle too recently, but their idea of distributing a PDF book with exact layout is doing OCR on it and then converting it to ePUB, destroying the layout altogether. All diagrams are lost and then they still take the lion’s share. Unusable.
Also, selling via Amazon channels sometimes means you are not allowed to distribute via other channels and/or not for a lower price. It is difficult to pin down this exactly, but it is not as easy as uploading your PDF and get it in print.
Lulu works with a production price, which is €40, slightly cheaper than Amazon, but without any distribution cost. So, it probably ends up the same way.
Apple’s iBookstore does not allow you to sell PDF books. When I started to write Mastering ArchiMate, I started in iBooks Author. I had to give that up because iBooks has serious problems with the sort of graphical content I have (vector art gets sampled to low res pixels, panning and zooming is seriously limited in iBooks). Besides, it is really weak in cross references and such. I moved to Adobe InDesign and paper/PDF because of these problems and I won’t be going back to iBooks for Edition 2 even if iBooks limitations and problems would have been solved.
So, I will try to get a print edition, but if I success, it definitely won’t be cheap.
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Thanks for this great material for anyone to catch up Archimate and Archi it self.
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