The Essential Meta-Model is in effect an ontology for the domain of enterprise architecture that has been developed from over ten years of applying enterprise architecture practices with a variety of EA frameworks and tools.

Importantly, it does not represent an attempt to supersede or conflict with well-established EA frameworks and their associated meta-models. Rather, the intention is to provide a comprehensive and extensible set of concepts and relationships, with clear semantics that can be easily mapped to the concepts, activities and tools of the industry standard frameworks.

Essential Meta Model Scope

The Core Meta-Model concepts and relationships are based on what is fast-becoming a standard twelve-box grid; with layers representing the areas of architecture to be understood and rows representing the levels of abstraction from which this understanding is to be viewed. More specifically, the architecture layers defined are:

• Business - knowledge related to the objectives, capabilities, people and processes of an enterprise
• Application - knowledge related to the functional behaviour provided by technology systems in support of business processes
• Information - knowledge related to the structured and unstructured information that support business processes, is managed by applications and is transmitted/stored using technology
• Technology - knowledge related to the software and hardware technology used to implement applications and transmit/store information.

• Conceptual View - the capabilities and concepts that represent the fundamental elements needed to meet the objectives of an enterprise (Strategic Agenda)
• Logical View - the approaches taken to realise the capabilities and concepts of the Conceptual View (Tactical Agenda)
• Physical View - the implementation of the approaches described in the Logical View (Operational Agenda).

• Strategy Management - managing an organisations future state and the intended road map for achieving it
  
• Change Management - managing the dependencies that impact the processes, people and IT of the enterprise during change, e.g. in support of project portfolio management or programme management
  
• Service Delivery - managing the dependencies that exist between processes, people and IT in support of the on-going operation of an enterprise.

Further support concepts are easily added to the overall meta model, including the following which are already planned:

• Security - managing knowledge related to the requirements, design and implementation of an organisation's security policies and architecture across business and IT.
  
• Information Lifecycle Management - defining and managing classification schemes and lifecycle policies related to the creation, distribution, retention and disposal of information in use across an organisation (viewed from a conceptual, logical or physical perspective).

Detailed definitions of the elements that comprise the Essential Meta-Model can be found in the Meta Model documentation section.