<p>The IDEAS Model is a formal ontology developed to support the exchange and sharing of enterprise architectures. It has been developed by the IDEAS Group, which is a consortium of Australian, Canadian, Swedish, UK and USA defence ministries.<br/></p><p><br/></p><p>This model is the IDEAS Foundation. Its purpose is to provide a basic framework for expressing concepts that are frequently used in enterprise architecture. It is expected that users and implementers will extend the IDEAS Foundation for their own purposes.<br/></p><p><br/></p><p>The IDEAS Foundation has been used as the basis for the DoDAF 2.0 Meta-Model (DM2). The high-level IDEAS categories (Individual, Type, tuple) have also been used to categorise the elements in the UPDM (www.updm.com) domain meta-model (they even followed the IDEAS colouring scheme).<br/></p><p><br/></p><p>The Foundation defines the building blocks of the ontology - Types, Individuals, and tuples (relationships). These building blocks are then used as the fundamental "language" of IDEAS - i.e. all other elements are defined in terms the Foundation elements. <br/></p><p><br/></p><p>The IDEAS Website is http://www.ideasgroup.org<br/></p><p><br/></p><p>To get started, we recommend you first read the diagram conventions, as the IDEAS ontology uses UML in a slightly unusual way. Then proceed onto the IDEAS Top Level and Key Objects:<br/></p>