Work that you do in System Architect is stored in a project encyclopedia. You can create an encyclopedia for every project, or have multiple projects in one encyclopedia. Encyclopedias are created as databases in an SQL Server. The relationship between the encyclopedia and the database is 1-to-1. That is, the encyclopedia is a database; each database contains only one encyclopedia.

All the diagrams and all the definitions, both those associated with diagrams and those that are not, are in the encyclopedia.

If you have several projects, you can have several encyclopedias. For example, you can build an enterprise encyclopedia in which you keep all the information relating to your company’s standards as well as information that has been used in old projects. When the company decides to start a new project, such as an Accounts Payable (AP) system, those parts of the enterprise encyclopedia that should be used as a “leaping off point” for the AP system are exported to a new encyclopedia. And after the AP system is completed, some of the information discovered in the process of designing that system might be merged into the enterprise encyclopedia.

The following topics introduce the aspects of working with an encyclopedia.