Building up and Exploiting Architectural Knowledge

Architectural knowledge consists of architecture design as well as the design decisions, assumptions, context, and other factors that together determine why a particular solution is the way it is. Except for the architecture design part, most of the architectural knowledge usually remains hidden, tacit in the heads of the architects. We conjecture that an explicit representation of architectural knowledge is helpful for building and evolving systems. If we had a repository of architectural knowledge for a system, what would it ideally contain, how would we build it, and exploit it in practice? In this paper we describe a use case model for an architectural knowledge system.