On archiving architecture documents

This paper presents a novel perspective on archiving architecture documents in large organizations. Designing and architecting a system deals with modeling the high level structure of a system in terms of views, architectural patterns and styles. Aspects such as knowledge management and archiving of architecture work done on artifacts of software projects challenge the large organizations. Knowledge management in such organizations depends on how well the company preserves the knowledge acquired on projects and how well the company provides the facilities to retrieve that architectural knowledge. The main issue in identification of the architecture documents is how we annotate these documents while storing in the repository. We have identified an approach on how these architecture documents can be annotated with architecture properties, and provided a comprehensive search design on the architecture documents already stored in the database. We describe how this perspective offers a good solution on archiving architecture documents and outlines various issues worthy of further exploration.