Architecture and Organization

Organization refers to the specific details of how a system implements a particular feature. It can be viewed as the lowest architectural level of a specific system.


Architecture refers to a 'virtual' representation of the system from some specific logical view point. It is possible to have multiple architectural views of a system depending on the specific interests.


A computer system's file-system access architecture provides a way to access stored data sets in an easily comprehended representation. It can also provide access control to the user.

But it also simplifies and hides the more technological aspects of file control from the user.

Consider Windows folders or Linux directory sturcture.

A computer system may use a variety of different file-system management protocols, such as NTFS for Windows or ext3 for Linux, to store and fetch files along with recording meta-data such as ownership and time created.

The file-system access architectural view, think Windows folders, does not care if the file is on CD/DVD, standard magnetic hard drive, or electronic solid-state drive. Nor does it care whether the data is stored/retrieved in 512 byte or 4096 byte blocks.

The purpose of an architectural view is to hide certain aspects of the reality of a system and emphasize and simplify other aspects.


Example

CD reader reads/interprets data by analyzing reflected laser light from a 'track' on the CD. The 'data' is encoded so that a change in reflectively in a given time span represents a zero and a lack of change represents a one. The reflective and non-reflective bits are also arranged so that correct timing may be derived when reading.

The music software, on the other hand, only cares that a series of bytes of data are supplied to it in a timely manor and that a sequence of these bytes can be decoded to represent the signal to send to the speaker to generate the sound desired.