RE: Status update

Let me focus on my exact questions.

The NIM draft states: "This document will describe requirements for the construction of an information model and the representation of basic modeling constructs." And, your last sentence of the second paragraph talks about "providing an infrastructure to define data structures in a protocol independent way". This says to me that NIM is only about language, structures and representation, and not about the content of the models themselves. Is this what NIM is? If so, isn't this what NMRG is working on?

Or, is NIM about doing both the representation and the model content in one WG? If so, how do you align with all the other IETF WGs - since I believe that many individual members and WGs (for example, DHCP and Policy) are working on models/schema now. Does all of this work come to NIM? If so, then it seems that NIM's scope is unbounded - which is a "Bad Thing" in the IETF. Also, we should discuss why we would create a modeling WG when we never created a MIB WG (ie, to do all the MIB design in one place).

Maybe what we need instead is a common representation, a goal of consistency across the IETF WGs in modeling, and a set of "modeling" folks to interface with the WGs and maintain consistency.

Andrea

First off, I believe we have addressed most of your concerns in previous mail messages and in the requirements doc itself. I believe, in fact, that this version of the requirements doc is more explicit about the goals then the previous version. So, for the benefit of some recent new subscribers to the list, let me give my sense of where we are and what we still need to address.

The basic premise of this work is that there are more and more divergent data structures being defined in a protocol specific way. With the competitive landscape growing with new protocols for managing networks, there is increasing pressure on the IETF's subject matter experts to define new data structures for each of these protocols. We are seeing this pressure in the form of directory schemas, PIBs, MIBs, Policy MIBs (SNMPCONF), and policy information models targeted for PCIM. In fact there are more on the horizon, but these are the ones we are concerned with now. It is becoming increasingly challenging for the subject matter experts for various technologies like MPLS and DiffServ to sustain the effort involved in defining and harmonizing all of these data structures. The specific goal (as it was envisioned by the original advocates of this work) was specificly to reduce this burden by providing an infrastructure to define data structures in a protocol independent way, with enough detail so as to minimize the burden associated with mapping these structures to various protocol specific data structures.