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.
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