Enterprise Architecture OKF

A corpus, not a wiki

At the center of it sits the Corpus: one official archive, not a loose collection of documents that happen to be true. Everything inside the Corpus is part of the governed record, but corpus membership alone does not place an artifact in force — authority arises through the applicable issuance or authorization mechanism (Auctoritas). Everything outside the Corpus — notes, drafts, working files — is evidence: useful, but not part of the governed record at all. That distinction is what keeps a growing body of decisions from quietly drifting out of sync with what a practice actually does.

What it actually holds

A small number of entity kinds, kept cleanly separated: the Intent a practice exists to serve; Principles and Constraints that rarely change; named Standards the practice measures itself against (this is exactly where a maturity model like the ones in this family lives); Decision Records for choices already made, so they aren't re-litigated; Work Packages with a clear scope and owner; Authorizations — formal, constitutive acts by which a human owner sanctions specific work; the Systems and Operations doing the actual work day to day; and Observations, the feedback that sharpens Intent over time as those systems actually run.

Where the models in this family stand

EA OKF is the schema this family is written in — not itself one of the models, the ground they all stand on. Each model is the actual product: a named Standard, expressed as structured, machine-readable governance rather than a one-off document, using exactly this schema underneath. Strata is the structure explaining how they relate to each other once they're in place.