IDEAS

The IDEAS Group was established in 2005 to align the national architecture frameworks of the defense departments of Australia, Canada, UK and USA. The result was a formal ontology which went on to be used in DoDAF, MODAF and UPDM (now UAF).

As well as working on meta-models, the group allowed the various members to gain a better understanding of each others' approaches. As a result, the documentation of MODAF 1.1 was revised to reflect the logical nature of the OV viewpoint. It also meant that DoDAF decided to adopt some of the views from MODAF - the capability and acquisition views.

The ontology development work was led by Ian Bailey from Model Futures with major contributions from BORO Solutions, Syntell AB, Cornwell Management Consulting (later Serco), Silver Bullet inc., Mitre, and the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA).

The IDEAS Foundation model can be viewed here

The US Department of Defense DoDAF DM2 model can be viewed here

The MODEM (MODAF Ontology) model can be viewed here

The UAF Domain Meta-Model (based on MODEM and DM2) can be viewed here All models are in UML.

Since IDEAS was released, the UK Government has also published a data exchange standard (the IES) which re-uses many of the concepts established in BORO and IDEAS. UK Govt IES website is still under construction, but there is a temporary site that can be viewed here

The IDEAS Group GitHub repository contains all the original models (as Sparx EA files) and the software we developed at the time to process and check the models.