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Purpose and justification, including the market relevance and
relationship to Safety (Guide 104), EMC (Guide 107), Environmental aspects
(Guide 109) and Quality assurance (Guide 102) . (attach a separate page as
annex, if necessary)
Specific aims:
International Standard ISO/IEC 11179, parts one to six, Information
technology - Specification and standardization of data elements,
developed by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 14 Data Element Principles, describes the
attribution, classification, definition, naming, identification, and
registration of data elements.
The ISO/IEC 11179 Specification and Standardization of Data Elements, Part
3, Basic Attributes provides naming, definitions, and specification of data
element attributes but does not provide an interface that allows for interoperability
in a distributed environment.
This interface will be a specification of the boundary of metadata
registries in terms of the possible interactions and properties that are
visible across the metadata registry boundary. A particular application will
then be able to interoperate with another application by calling the services
named in the interface.
Main interest:
This standard will further expand upon the 11179 so that Electronic Data
Interchange (EDI) data element designers', software engineers, and end-users
can understand the behaviors that the medatdata registry carries out and the
parts of the system responsible for these behavior.
All domains of business that need to store and disseminate information
about information will benefit. One such area of interest arises from a need
to provide common information models for domains such as medicine. These
common information models can be stored in metadata regitries whereby a
common interface could provide the necessary behaviors for assisting in the
manipulation of a particular common information model.
Feasibility:
In order to accomplish this it will be necessary to define objects that
are themselves descriptions of sets of behaviors that occurs in relationship
to the real world uses of a metadata registry. Objects provide a tractable
way of organizing the complexity of a particular domain, in this case
metadata registries. Consequently, in order to subsume the true benefits of
Object Technology every object has a well-defined interface that specifies
the behavior of the object in a manner that is independent of its
implementation. This interface defines a collection of services that can be
invoked by other objects. The implementation of an object describes how to
carry out its services.
The following service areas will be defined, high volume on-line services
such as translation, inference, presentation, and perusal and browsing
services as a means of understanding the content and structure of specific
metadata.
It is anticipated that the Lexicon Query Service (LQS) specification that
is in the final stages of adoption by the Object Management Group (OMG) and
will be used as a pattern in creating the Metadata Query Service.
Timeliness:
There exist many fronts where metadata is being utilized and the need for
a standard interface is most likely past due. For example, cases tools, and
distributed object repositories.
Urgency:
Without a standard it is more likely that proprietary solutions will
emerge. It is anticipated that as the industry turns to distributed object
computing for enterprise interoperability metadata registries will begin to
play a major role, consequently, there must exist a standard interface to
these registries to help offset the costs associated with the potential
emergence of proprietary solutions.
Benefits:
This interface will determine the external view of metadata, what it is,
and how it will act and react.
This interface will document what it does, not how it does it.
The behaviors of this interface will be captured in Interface Definition
Language (IDL). IDL provides the standard interface between objects, and is
the base mechanism for object interaction.
IDL is an Open Software Foundation (OSF) standard for defining Remote
Procedure Calls (RPC) stubs. OSF is a foundation created to promote
"Open Computing". RPC is a protocol, which allows a program running
on one host to cause code to be executed on another host without the
programmer needing to explicitly code for this.
Existing regulations:
? I am not sure and will need help in defining them if they exist.
Other:
A first draft proposal for this standard is attached. It contains a
discussion section as a focal point for members to review. It is meant to be
a working document that will live in parallel with the standards work.
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