The Essential Project is the collective name for a set of open source, enterprise architecture support tools that have been developed for use in conjunction with a variety of Enterprise Architecture approaches and frameworks.

The reason for the name is that these tools are focused solely on providing only those capabilities that are "essential" to maximising the value of enterprise architecture; helping organisations manage and analyse the knowledge needed to make decisions that impact or are impacted by the enterprise architecture.

More specifically, the components that currently comprise the Essential Project are:

			The Essential Meta-Model, a framework-independent set of semantic definitions for knowledge related to the building blocks and relationships of an enterprise. Find out more about Essential Meta Model...
			The Essential Architecture Manager, a knowledge repository and reporting tool for capturing and then querying information based on the Essential Meta-Model. Find out more about Essential Architecture Manager...

The Essential Project toolset is open source and has been used and tested extensively in a production environment. These tools are available for use by any individual or organisation free of charge, with no initial or on-going support or maintenance charges, under the GNU General Public License.