Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing

The Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) is an abstract metamodel, defined in the ISO/IEC 10746 standard, for documenting distributed systems. Rather than prescribing a single way to describe an architecture, it defines a common vocabulary and structure that other architecture descriptions can be built from.

RM-ODP’s central idea is that no single description can capture a complex distributed system in full, so it defines five complementary viewpoints — enterprise, information, computational, engineering, and technology — each addressing the system’s design from a different concern, at a different level of abstraction. A complete RM-ODP-conformant description combines all five, similar in spirit to how the C4 model or other multi-view architecture frameworks combine several views into one coherent whole.