Creating a Glossary for our Tool

[mertaksac]

While working on the new Area 9 (Freight and Fleet Management(FFM)), Peter found that it is necessary to use a number of Technical Terms (currently 13) that relate to FFM rather than ITS. He asked me to find a (easy to use) mechanism within Enterprise Architect that would enable a User (a) to be informed that ‘xxx’ was a technical term and (b) to be able to look up its definition.

I have created a new Diagram with many "Glossary Entry"s under the landing page package of our tool.

We could hyperlink any text to these items and let the user investigate the definitions of these terms.

I would like to demonstrate my findings in upcoming maintainer telcos.

1- we can hyperlink "things" to any part of the text in the "notes section" (where the description of user needs go)

2- if we create these terms as "glossary entries", EA identifies these as "elements" and thus we can hyperlink to these terms within the description of a User Need

3- we could even make the diagram where these entries would be found to be opened as specification view (similar to the user needs)

4- user may select what to do with these hyperlinks a) find them in Project Browser b) find them on a Diagram c) investigate their properties

[bossomr]

It sounds like a good idea, although I would like to see the demonstration of its use as described above. It could be expanded to include definitions of other terms used in the FRAME Architecture, for example not everyone may be familiar with the term "green wave". This could be a better way of defining other terms used in the FRAME Architecture rather than including the definitions in the "notes" or elsewhere and should be easy to maintain,

[mertaksac]

we discussed this in today's maintainers' meeting and decided to create a "document" using EA's facility instead of creating separate objects for each term. main reason was that we would need to link each term wherever it is being used, be it user needs or descriptions of the functions and that would create a big load of work (one term may be used in multiple places and finding + linking them would mean going over the whole repository).

now we will include the terms in a "glossary" document and point the users there for any unknown term instead of linking them to the descriptions.

[bossomr]

This sounds like a good idea. It would be nice if the names of the Functional Areas in which the terms are used can be added to each definition as I think it will make their relevance easier to understand.