Ideas for a nice and elegant way to implement profiles and concepts customization

This is an attempt at sharing and clarifying ideas for a nice and elegant way to implement profiles and concepts customization. But first, what are profiles and concept customization?

Profiles and concept customization

Profiles and concept customization are described in the chapter 15 of the official ArchiMate specifications. To explain it the simpliest way, a profile is a named set of attributes (attributes is the official ArchiMate name for what Archi call properties). For example if you have to manage cost related attributes on several elements (whatever their type is) you could define a "cost" profile which includes an "acquisition cost" and a "running cost" attributes.

On top of that, concept specialization allows you to define your own concepts (elements or relationships). Specialized concepts inherits all properties of their "ancestor" but can also limit some of them. For example one could define a "Database" concept that would inherit from the "Artifact" concept, and decide that the realization from "Artifact" to "Application Component" is not allowed for the "Database" concept as a database is mostly data and not code (I know that you can put code inside some databases but I simplify for the sake of the example).

Note: UML comes with the notion of "stereotype" and "profile". UML "profile" is not at all similar to ArchiMate profile. In UML a profile is more a grouped definition of multiple stereotypes. UML "stereotype" is very similar to ArchiMate concept specialization, so in this document I now use "stereotype" to speak about concept specialization.

ArchiMate standard also explains that you can mix stereotypes and profile. That is to say that you can define a "Database" stereotype of "Artifact" and associate at the same time some pre-defined attributes (e.g. SGBD, Host, Port...).

Last but not least, in a perfect world (ie. a tool that would implement all things described in the standard) you could also decide to change figure and/or icon of a stereotype.