Acme: An

Numerous architectural description languages (ADLs) have been developed, each providing complementary capabilities for architectural development and analysis. Unfortunately, each ADL and supporting toolset operates in isola-tion, making it dicult to integrate those tools and share architectural descriptions. Acme is being developed as a joint eort of the software architecture research community as a com-mon interchange format for architecture de-sign tools. Acme provides a structural frame-work for characterizing architectures, together with annotation facilities for additional ADL-speci c information. This scheme permits sub-sets of ADL tools to share architectural infor-mation that is jointly understood, while tol-erating the presence of information that falls outside their common vocabulary. In this pa-per we describe Acme's key features, rationale, and technical innovations.