Requirements and objectives
sowa@watson.ibm.com
Message-id: <9202081716.AA06054@quark.isi.edu>
Date: Sat, 8 Feb 92 12:13:27 EST
From: sowa@watson.ibm.com
To: kr-advisory@ISI.EDU, srkb@ISI.EDU, interlingua@ISI.EDU
Subject: Requirements and objectives
Recent email discussions have mentioned the need for a comprehensive
list of requirements that could focus some of the debate about whether
one feature or another is necessary or desirable. Jerry Winkler, the
chair of ANSI X3H4, just circulated the following list of objectives
for IRDS (Information Resource Dictionary Systems).
Although the IRDS effort grew out of a business environment that is
very different from the AI research community, there is a large overlap
between these requirements and those that would be needed for large,
shared knowledge bases.
Winkler is soliciting comments by February 15th. If anyone has any
comments or suggestions that they would like me to forward to him,
please send them this week.
John Sowa
_________________________________________________________________________
Objectives of IRDS Standardization Activities
o Enable the adoption of a single, world-wide standard that
satisfies the known needs of enterprises for managing their
information resources
o Provide specifications that facilitate the cost-effective
implementation and utilization of IRDS technology
o Provide a cohesive and comprehensive model of IRDS technology
standardization requirements
o Identify services and functionality that
- enable the effective and efficient management and utilization
of enterprise information resources
- minimize the cost of designing, developing, operating, and
maintaining business functions and information systems
- enable an open market for tools
- enable the quality management of IRDS functionality and
content
Objectives of IRDS
a. Enable the effective and efficient management and utilization
of enterprise information resources. This will be
accomplished by providing specifications that enable the:
a.1 Effective management and utilization of the representation of
information resources
a.2 Effective integration of an enterprise's models and submodels
a.3 Sharing of information resources
a.4 Reuse of information resources
a.5 Elimination of redundant information resources
a.6 Describing of all models of information resources to allow for
a.6.1 Effective utilization of multiple modeling paradigms.
a.6.2 Representing the dynamics of business functions, and
automated systems and processes
a.6.3 Modeling all data types
a.6.4 The evolution of models and modeling paradigms
a.7 Simulation of business functions, and automated systems and
processes
a.8 IRDS interoperability
a.9 The analysis of impact on the enterprise information
environment caused by changes to information resources
b. Minimize the cost of developing, operating and maintaining
information systems. This will be accomplished by providing
specifications that facilitate:
b.1 Providing sharable, reusable and nonredundant information
about information systems throughout their life cycle
b.2 Sharing of descriptions of information systems within and
between enterprises
b.3 Managing the evolution of information systems
c. Enable an open market for tools by providing specifications
for
c.1 Interfaces that allow for bulk transfer of IRDS managed data
(schema and data)
c.2 Interfaces that enable access to and management of IRDS
managed data by local and distributed tools
c.3 Toolset integration with respect to the information being
shared by tools belonging to the toolset
d. Enable the quality management of IRDS functionality and
content by providing specifications for
d.1 The automatic enforcement of policies, standards, conventions
and metrics with regard to IRDS content
d.2 Tool access to policies, standards, conventions and metrics
d.3 Unambiguous identification of information resource
descriptions and models (schema and data)
d.4 Controlling access to IRDS content and functionality
d.5 Managing the quality of IRDS content, including
d.5.1 Controlling the effect of multiple, concurrent,
distributed processors on IRDS content