This document provides an overview of the whole ISO/IEC 19763 series. This overview includes the purpose, the underlying concepts, the overall architecture and the requirements for the development of other standards within the 19763 series.

Collectively, the other parts of the ISO/IEC 19763 series provide a set of normative metamodels to enable the registration of many different types of model. Each of these metamodels is expressed both as a UML class diagram and, more formally, in text. The metamodels, along with the specification in ISO/IEC 11179‑3, define the information about the models that is to be registered. The models themselves can be stored in a modelrepository or can just exist as paper documents.

The ISO/IEC 19763 series does not specify any physical structure of a registry where model information is to be recorded.