Characterizing Relations between Architectural Views

This section introduces the basic architectural concepts and terminology that we will use in the remainder of the paper. There are several known definitions of architecture and architectural views in the literature, the SEI [3,8], Siemens [20], ISO 42010 or RM-ODP [23]. We adopt the conceptual model of ISO 42010, to serve as a consistent set of basic terminology. This does not mean that our scope is limited to the standard; we studied a broad range of approaches in the literature.2 ISO 42010 has two parts. The first part is a conceptual model for architectural descriptions. The conceptual model introduces and interrelates such concepts as architectural description, concern, viewpoint, view and model. The second part puts forward required content for any ISO 42010-conformant architectural description, independent of the specific architectural languages in use. Here, we only use the conceptual model. Figure 1 shows a portion of the ISO 42010 conceptual model relevant for this paper.

An architectural description (AD) is “a collection of products to document a specific architecture”. An AD is organized into one or more architectural views, where a view is defined as “a representation of a whole system from the perspective of a related set of concerns”. Each view is constructed according to an architectural viewpoint, defined as “the conventions for constructing and using a view; a pattern or template from which to develop individual views by establishing the purposes and audience for a view and the techniques for its creation and analysis”. One of ISO 42010’s contributions was