ArchiMate® 3.2 Specification

The ArchiMate® Specification, a standard of The Open Group, defines an open and independent modeling language for Enterprise Architecture that is supported by different tool vendors and consulting firms. The ArchiMate language enables Enterprise Architects to describe, analyze, and visualize the relationships among business domains in an unambiguous way.

This is the official specification of the ArchiMate 3.2 modeling language from The Open Group.

The contents of the specification include the following:

• The introduction, including the objectives, overview, conformance requirements, and terminology
• Definitions of the general terms used in the specification
• The structure of the modeling language
• The generic metamodel of the language
• The relationships in the language
• A detailed breakdown of the modeling framework covering the motivation elements, Strategy Layer elements, and the three core layers (Business/Application/Technology)
• Relationships between core layers
• Implementation and Migration Layer elements for expressing the implementation and migration aspects of an architecture
• The concepts of stakeholders, architecture viewpoints, and views, as well as the ArchiMate viewpoint mechanism
• Mechanisms for customizing the language for specialized or domain-specific purposes
• Notation overviews and summaries

The intended audience is threefold:

• Enterprise Architecture practitioners, such as architects (e.g., application, information, process, infrastructure, and, obviously, Enterprise Architects), senior and operational management, project leaders, and anyone committed to work within the reference framework defined by the Enterprise Architecture
• Those who intend to implement the ArchiMate language in a software tool; they will find a complete and detailed description of the language in this standard
• The academic community, on which we rely for amending and improving the language based on state-of-the-art research results in the architecture field