Moregraph: Metadata-Driven Enterprise Architecture Using Conceptual Structures

Enterprise Architecture (EA) enables organisations to articulate their business purpose, from strategy to execution, without incurring technical debt. Data infrastructures underpin their EA, enabling organisations to derive their purpose from their data landscape. Metadata, a crucial aspect of this infrastructure, is a human construct that gives meaning to the data and shapes the organisation’s EA. The data objects referenced by metadata, however, are usually encapsulated inside applications. The Moregraph application visualises the data objects and their relations, unrestricted by application boundaries, thus allowing the data objects to express their semantics directly at a more precise level of granularity. Conceptual Graphs are used to maintain the requirements for Moregraph’s conceptual structure, which is then implemented using SAP Graph to access the data objects in SAP Business Accelerator Hub. As these data objects are clean core, they can be extended or compared by organisations to address their technical debt at the same level of granularity, with further opportunities for application and Application Programming Interface (API) rationalisation. From these experiences alongside SAP as the representative case study, Moregraph advances metadata-driven enterprise architecture and informs the direction of future work.