DoD Architecture Framework Volume II: Product Descriptions

The Department of Defense (DoD) Architecture Framework (DoDAF), Version 1.0, defines a common approach for DoD architecture description development, presentation, and integration for both warfighting operations and business operations and processes. The Framework is intended to ensure that architecture descriptions can be compared and relate across organizational boundaries, including Joint and multinational boundaries. An architecture description is a representation of a defined domain, as of a current or future point in time, in terms of its constituent parts, what those parts do, how the parts relate to each other and to the environment, and the rules and constraints governing them. Within the DoDAF, architectures are described in terms of three views: Operational View (OV), Systems View (SV), and Technical Standards View (TV). An architecture description is composed of architecture products that are interrelated within each view and are interrelated across views. Architecture products are those graphical, textual, and tabular items that are developed in the course of gathering architecture data, identifying their composition into related architecture components or composites, and modeling the relationships among those composites to describe characteristics pertinent to the architecture’s intended use. Underlying the products is the All- DoD Core Architecture Data Model (CADM), which defines a standard set of architecture data entities and relationships of architecture data.

The term integrated architecture refers to an architecture description that has integrated OVs, SVs, and TVs (i.e., there are common points of reference linking the OV and SV and also linking the SV and TV). The Operational Activity to Systems Function Traceability Matrix (SV-5), for example, relates operational activities from the Operational Activity Model (OV-5) to system functions from the Systems Functionality Description (SV-4); the SV-4 system functions are related to systems in the Systems Interface Description (SV-1), thus bridging the OV and SV. An architecture is defined to be an integrated architecture when products and the constituent architecture data elements are developed such that architecture data elements defined in one view are the same (i.e., same names, definitions, and values) as architecture data elements
referenced in another view.