ISO has published ISO/IEC 42010:2007, Systems and software engineering — Recommended practice for architectural description of software-intensive systems. The text of this ISO standard is identical to IEEE 1471:2000, and will serve as basis for the joint ISO and IEEE revision.
The joint revision has several goals:
- to widen the scope of application from software-intensive systems to general systems architecture (including enterprise architecture);
- to harmonize with the ISO systems engineering (ISO 15288) and software engineering (ISO 12207) life cycle processes; and
- to align terms and concepts with other ISO architecture efforts, including RM-ODP (ISO 10746) and GERAM (ISO 15704).
As shown below there are many views to architectures. Many times architects want to create the one ultimate view. This is just unrealistic. The 1471 standard provides a taxonomy to represent these architecture views.
At the present time, frameworks are aligning to 1471. TOGAF embraces but does not strictly adhere to ANSI/IEEE Std 1471-2000 terminology. From the horses mouth:
In TOGAF we endeavor to strike a balance between promoting the concepts and terminology of ANSI/IEEE Std 1471-2000 - ensuring that our usage of terms defined by ANSI/IEEE Std 1471-2000 is consistent with the standard - and retaining other commonly accepted terminology that is familiar to the majority of the TOGAF readership.
Additionally, this can also fit into a mapping of views to the schema of the well-known Zachman Framework.
For more information go to the IEEE 147 site.
