Re: Closing on NIM requirements

["John Strassner" <jstrassn@cisco.com>]

comments inline.

regards,
John

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Saperia [mailto:saperia@mediaone.net]
> Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2000 2:43 PM
> To: Harald Tveit Alvestrand; Durham, David; 'Weiss,
Walter';
> 'nim@ops.ietf.org'
> Subject: Re: Closing on NIM requirements
>
> I have a stated a preference for UML in the past. The
> interesting question that this discussion begs is: if
> people believe LDAP and SNMP (and others) are not able
> to effectively represent what is in the 'higher-level'
> models, what should be done?

Please see my original response. The purpose of modeling is
to represent information in a
form that is independent of any particular storage
mechanism, technology or access protocol. It is up to us to
define a mapping from this repository- and
protocol-independent specification to a particular
repository. As an example, this is what the Policy Framework
WG has done: define one set of information modeling drafts,
and define another, complementary set of mapping drafts that
show how the information model may be realized in a schema.

Sometimes the mappings are direct, and sometimes they are
indirect. Direct mappings mean that the information being
modeled can be directly represented in a given repository.
An indirect mapping means that the information being modeled
must either be represented in another way, or represented
using another tool that works with the repository. An
example of the former is mapping a weak aggregation to DIT
containment in a directory mapping. An example of the latter
is implementing behavior using middleware.

>...
> /jon