Overview
One of the primary mechanisms used for descriptions of the world is relating a story in terms of an ordered sequence of events or activities. The IDEF3 Process Description Capture Method was created to capture descriptions of sequences of activities, which is considered the common mechanisms to describe a situation or process. The primary goal of IDEF3 is to provide a structured method by which a domain expert can express knowledge about the operation of a particular system or organization. Knowledge acquisition is enabled by direct capture of assertions about real-world processes and events in a form that is most natural for capture. IDEF3 supports this kind of knowledge acquisition by providing a reliable and wellstructured approach for process knowledge acquisition, and an expressively, yet easy-to-use, language for information capture and expression.
Motives for the development of IDEF3 were the need:
- to speed up the process of business systems modeling,
- to provides mechanisms to describe this data life cycle information,
- to supported project management techniques by an automated tool,
- to provide the concepts, syntax, and procedures for building system requirements descriptions, and
- to work well both independently and jointly with other methods which address different areas of concentration (e.g., the IDEF0 Function Modeling method) as a complementary addition to the IDEF method family.
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