NOV-7 describes the structure of an architecture domain's system data types and the structural business process rules (defined in the architecture's NOV subviews) that govern the system data. It provides a definition of architecture domain data types, their attributes or characteristics, and their interrelationships.

HOPEX NAF can be used to design data models in NOV-7. The data model is a concept that can be graphically designed in Data model diagrams. The user creates new data models from the NAF navigation tree.

The data models are described by one or more data model diagrams, which contain entities with their attributes and the associations between the entities.

The entities should correlate with the NOV-3 information elements. These elements are modeled with the HOPEX content objects and the content can be linked to a data model.

An information model should be based on the NAV-2 subview, which actually forms the operational domain object model and which contains the definitions of all the concepts that are relevant for the architecture effort.

In turn, NOV-7 should be used as an input to NSV-11, which captures logical and physical data models.

The NOV-7 report template is delivered with a report that describes data models.

The first parameter in this template is used to indicate the architecture to be analyzed.

The second parameter, Data Model Subset, is optional and is used to reduce the scope of the study to a subset of the data models of the architecture. If this parameter is not set, all the data models defined within the architecture are taken into account.

This chapter lists all the selected data models in a table with their short name, long name and comment.

Paragraphs specific to each data model are then displayed. These paragraphs contain the following items:

This chapter presents in table form the hierarchy of all the data models of the architecture. A comment or definition is also displayed for the different data models.