What are the common Enterprise Architecture Frameworks?

To manage different levels of abstraction, enterprise architecture frameworks (EAFs) can be used.  (Bernard, 2004) describes EAF as “It is a structure for organizing information that defines the scope of the architecture and how the areas of the architecture relate to each other”. -MBSE Grid

Defense-Oriented Enterprise Architecture Frameworks

Currently, all of the defense oriented EAFs are very similar from the views and viewpoints point of view and different from the meta-model point of view.

1. Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF)

2. Ministry of Defense Architecture Framework (MODAF)

3. NATO Architecture Framework (NAF)

Industry-Oriented Enterprise Architecture Frameworks

The most common problem of industry EAFs is that there is no standardized way for storing and exchanging data, as opposed to defense EAFs, e.g., DoDAF provides a whole document describing data exchange, which is one of the biggest problems in defense domain (US Department of Defense, 2009).

4. TOGAF

Provides the structure, meta-model, and method for creating the enterprise architecture.

5. FEAF

6. Zachman

Zachman framework is the first enterprise architecture framework defining the logical structure for classifying and organizing the descriptive representations of that enterprise (Lankhorst, 2009).