A Governed Indicator Profile for Enterprise Architecture: Conceptual Design and Verification in NAF v4.1
Architectural measurements acquire decision meaning through explicit links to their subjects, definitions, evidence, interpretation criteria, and accountable owners. This article proposes a governed indicator profile for the NATO Architecture Framework version 4.1, composed with Unified Architecture Framework version 1.3 measurement semantics. An evidence-informed Design Science method allocates responsibilities to reused standards concepts and explicit local bindings. The solution organizes host architecture, indicators, measurements, provenance, governance, validation, and optional simulation into seven layers. Six indicator roles distinguish assessment purpose, while separate definition and observation objects preserve measurement meaning across views. The article specifies the relationships, constraints, implementation mappings, and a complete symbolic service-availability example. A reference implementation comprises fourteen contract classes, eleven connector stereotypes, and sixteen registered rules. Its recorded deterministic corpus contains fourteen positive rule checks, fourteen targeted negative detections, and five expected boundary outcomes, with agreement across the compared representations. Aggregation retains partial acceptance. The contribution is a conceptual model and composition procedure connecting architectural measurement to evidence and decision accountability. The implementation supports selected executable obligations; organizational effectiveness, complete semantic enforcement, and normative standards conformance require separate evaluation.
Authors
- Anacleto C. Correia (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7248-4310)
- Pedro Caetano (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8624-6401)
- Antonio Goncalves (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6091-2624)
- Rui Lampreia (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3748-4320)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Preprints.org
- Published
- 2026-10-29
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202610.2914.v1
- Primary Topic
- Information Technology Governance and Strategy
- Type
- preprint