System modeling is all too often a flight for abstraction, when business analysts should instead look for the proper level of representation, ie the one with the best fit to business concerns.

Caminao’s blog (see Topics Guide) will try to set a path to Architecture Driven System Modelling. The guiding principle is to look at systems as sets of symbolic representations and identify the core archetypes defining how they must be coupled to their actual counterparts. That would provide for lean (need-to-know specs) and fit (architecture driven) models, architecture traceability, and built-in consistency checks.
This blog is meant to be a work in progress, with the basic concepts set open to suggestions or even refutation:
- What is to be represented.
- Who is to use the representations.
- When are the representations to be used.
- How objects and activities are to be represented.
- How are representations to be implemented.
All examples are taken from ancient civilizations in order to put the focus on generic problems of symbolic architectures, disregarding technologies.

Original illustrations by Albert (http://www.albertdessinateur.com/) allow for concrete understanding of requirements, avoiding the biases associated with contrived textual descriptions.