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>From aia-workshop-request@csc.ti.com Fri Feb 26 10:56:31 1993
From: hodges@lobby.ti.com (R. Hodges)
Subject: AIA Summary
To: aia-workshop@csc.ti.com
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 93 10:47:03 CST
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.2 PL16]
Application Integration Architectures Workshop
Executive Summary
In the last several years, many organizations, including both national and international standards bodies and industrial consortia, have developed a variety of software architectures for application and enterprise integration. These application integration architectures cover a broad spectrum of information technology (IT) including distributed systems, frameworks based on a backplane of services, integrated software engineering environments, repositories, and data management. For some time, there has been a need to somehow insure that emerging de facto and de jure standards for integration architectures will work together.
During the week of February 8-12, 1993, forty individuals from twenty-five standards development organizations met in Dallas, Texas, to participate in the first Workshop on Application Integration Architectures. The objective of the workshop was provide a one-stop-shopping forum, until now missing, where individuals active in standardization could meet together to address technical and management problems associated with coordinating the development of a shared vision of a common industry-wide integration architecture.
The workshop, coordinated and hosted by Texas Instruments, provided a neutral venue where diverse perspectives could be considered. While individuals attending were not "official" representatives of groups they attend, their participation nevertheless served to provide a "big picture" of the application integration architectures standardization landscape. Workshop attendees included individuals active in industrial consortia, military and government standards groups, and national and international standards bodies (see list below). Some of the groups represented focus on generic software architectures while others focus on architectures for software, electrical and mechanical design, manufacturing, and other domains. While many of the groups develop component standards or families of standards, others profile collections of standards to find collections that work together in an integrated manner. The workshop covered both standards producer and standards customer perspectives. The operating rules, schedules, and scope of the groups vary but their common interest is to set standards for integration technologies.
WORKSHOP CONTENT: The workshop began with the vision that standards for managing, sharing and using information assets "enable the integrated enterprise." Workshop participants identified goals leading toward this vision. Our goals are to: (1) provide coordinated IT standards with minimal redundancy and a common vocabulary, (2) minimize the time and cost to establish new IT standards, (3) minimize the time and cost of producing standards-based IT products, and (4) minimize the time and cost of integrating those standards-based products.
Substantial time was spent in plenary sessions in which representatives of each group described their group's scope, membership, activities, liaisons, and schedule. This part of the meeting served to insure that each group was aware of complementary groups that might sometimes provide needed solutions to related problems. The remainder of the workshop took on a town hall flavor with long sessions addressing both technical and management topics.
The technical sessions focused on data and object models and on plug-and-play, compositional architectures. While there is a requirement to deal with legacy data models, many groups report moving toward object models for a wide range of enterprise needs in integrating information and applications. There is no single standard for object models so several hybrid models are being formulated to add modeling power to subsume other models (e.g., the entity- relationship model). A major integration problem identified at the workshop is the need to share enterprise information represented for different purposes in different object models. One group, X3H7 Object Information Management Technical Committee, is acting as a focal point for comparing different standards' object modeling needs and is working with other groups to develop strategies for evolving IT standards toward compatible, common perspectives on object-based standards that would support improved interoperability of future IT standards-based products.
In considering different architectures, we began by noting that some existing IT standards seem to be monolithic compositions of more primitive standards and might better be decomposed. We spent most time on plug-and-play architectures providing common runtime services. These integration architectures promise to make next generation applications easier to develop, since common services will be reused through a shared basis for specifying and requesting services. Problems identified with this approach are: (1) to get most benefit, these architectures must be "open" to allow addition or replacement of services, (2) careful integration is required to achieve openness, and (3) different standards groups and different IT products bundle overlapping collections of services. A first step toward integration is for groups to develop a profile of services and to compare these profiles.
Management sessions focused on ways to improve the effectiveness of computer standards development process. Workshop participants identified the need for standards groups and industrial consortia to cooperate more effectively. Some of the roadblocks are: (1) the number of meetings involved, (2) openness of membership, (3) schedule, (4) lack of understanding regarding different groups' missions and modes of operation. Believing that better cooperation could yield complementary, non-overlapping standards that will enable integration, the participants developed a model for interaction among accredited standards committees and industry consortia. The model suggests that consortia should become active members of the relevant standards development organizations, and that they actively promote "interim" standards they are developing in order to accelerate development of evolving formal standards. The model, it was agreed, does not require any new formal standards coordination organization, instead relying on improving the effectiveness of existing "liaison" mechanisms. As a first step, the group developed a snapshot of current standards work and a began work on a roadmap to discover where communications paths among the standards and consortia needed reinforcement or realignment. The workshop provided the overview needed to encourage individuals to work together in forging better relationships between related groups.
WORKSHOP RESULTS: Workshop attendees recognized the need for continuing work that was started at this workshop. Several participants volunteered to contribute time or resources to support:
0 a central catalog of groups, listing scope, work items, schedule, liaisons, and, where relevant, brief descriptions of each group's data/object models and services provided. With some analysis, a roadmap showing which group is producing what by when will be available to allow groups to better coordinate their efforts.
0 a central calendar for groups to allow groups to plan overlapping meetings.
0 a second workshop, or "congress," planned for December 1993 to provide continuity and a second chance to build a shared "big picture."
A Workshop Report is planned and should be available in late April 1993.
AFFILIATIONS OF WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS: Workshop participants included individuals working in the following groups or organizations (in alphabetical order):
1. CALS Industry Steering Group Information Integration Working Group (IIWG)
2. CASE Communique
3. CASE Data Interchange Format (CDIF)
4. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
5. DoD Ada Joint Program Office (AJPO)
6. DoD Corporate Information Management (CIM) Initiative
7. International Conference on Enterprise Integration Modeling Technology (ICEIMT)
8. ISO TC184/SC4 Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP)
9. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC21/WG3 (Reference Model of Data Management)
10. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7/WG11 (Description of Data for Software Engineering)
11. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
12. Network Management Forum (NMF)
13. North American PCTE Initiative (NAPI)
14. Object Management Group (OMG)
15. Portable Common Interface Set (PCIS)
16. Rapid Response Manufacturing Consortium
17. SEMATECH
18. Navy Next Generation Computing Resources (NGCR) Project Support Environment Standards Working Group (PSESWG)
19. Unix International
20. USAF Integration Toolkit and Methods (ITKM) Program
21. X/Open
22. X3H2 (Database), ISO/IEC JTC1/SC21/WG3 (SQL DBL Rapporteur Group)
23. X3H4 (Information Resource Dictionary System), ISO/IEC JTC1/SC21/WG3 (IRDS Rapporteur Group)
24. X3H6 (CASE Tool Integration Models)
25. X3H7 (Object Information Management)
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