1. Resolutions of the Joint Workshop: Managing Modeling Activities

The Joint Workshop on Standards for the Use of Models that Define the Data and Processes of Information Systems, hereinafter referred to as the "Joint Workshop", met in Bellevue, Washington, USA, in September 1996. The following resolutions to JTC1 are the product of that workshop.

Other components of the Report of the Joint Workshop

1. Participation in the Joint Workshop
2. Call for Participation in the Joint Workshop
3. Document Log of the Joint Workshop

Contents of Resolutions Document

1. Summary of Resolutions
2. Situation
3. Resolutions
   1. Sharing and Reuse of Standards for Modeling
   2. Managing Duplication of Standards for Modeling
   3. Registration of Metadata

Summary of Resolutions

1. Sharing and Reuse of Standards for Modeling
   1. JWS R1.1. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend that ISO and IEC establish a joint technical supervisory group to identify potential overlap of standards for development and use of models and to recommend action to reduce the overlap and/or coordinate the standards.
   2. JWS R1.2. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend that ISO and IEC establish electronic means to support mutual access to model-related work in process across working groups. These means should include topic-based access.
   3. JWS R1.3. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend that ISO and IEC establish market-oriented publishing policies and methods.
2. Managing Duplication of Standards for Modeling
   1. JWS R2.1. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend to all its subcommittees and to appropriate technical committees of ISO and IEC, to UN/EDIFACT and to appropriate liaison organizations, that they recognize the proliferation of modeling languages, and the duplication of efforts in producing and using modeling standards.
   2. JWS R2.2. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend to all its subcommittees and to appropriate technical committees of ISO and IEC, to UN/EDIFACT that they jointly develop a reference document on modeling and the use of models in the design, construction and management of information systems.
   3. JWS R2.3. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend that JTC1/SC7 conduct a study period to establish the technical basis for a program of work leading to the standardization for the mapping of modeling languages.
3. Registration of Metadata
   1. JWS R3.1. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 organize a Workshop on Metadata Registration.
   2. JWS R3.2. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 change their procedures to include registration of the metadata in standard models as part of the standard publication procedure.

Situation

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Industry in the information age requires the communication of large volumes of data among enterprises. These enterprise include not only the companies that manufacture and market the products of industry, but also the governmental agencies that coordinate and regulate that industry, and the academic organizations that supply industry with a stream of new research and talent.

Computing technology has become the primary tool for the management and distribution of this data. In the last decades of the Twentieth Century, communication and computing technology have both seen explosive growth through the emergence of a mutual positive feedback loop in which competitive improvements in technology have enabled improved communication, while the competitive value of better communication has generated increased demand for computing technology. This rapid evolution produces continuous change both in the kinds of data to be exchanged and in the technology that manages that data.

The challenge to an enterprise is how to enable its computer to send data to the computers of other enterprises, and have those other computers and enterprises do what we expect them to do, despite these constant changes.

We do this everyday with certain kinds of information. For example, we are able to exchange quantitative data because the concepts and labels for each units of measure has been standardized internationally. The scientific community learned in the 1800's that they could not communicate in units of measure unless they agreed to a universal meaning for each and used a consistent label. Further, they realized an international system for the calibration of measurement processes was required to transfer the meaning of a unit to a measurement instance. Otherwise, organizations could not trust that the unit of measure concept had been correctly applied and the reported value be used to make decisions. Being able to share units of measure has been very powerful for industry.

The same standardization and calibration requirements exist for the communication of business concepts such as those conveyed by these words: product, delivering, shipping, transporting, etc. The concepts must be agreed internationally, a unique label assigned, and a system of relating labels that serves the equivalent purpose of calibration must be put into place.

All of these standards including units of measure need a system by which a person can find the business concept they are looking for so that they can enter the correct label into the computer. As these standards are used the labels for them may come into common use. This may take several decades for humans. For computers it is an immediate necessity.

The everyday concepts of business need to be standardized and labeled like the units of measure, so that computers at the bidding of organizations can carry out work among enterprises without human involvement, except at installation.

Data and process modeling techniques provide a means for managing standard definitions of business concepts, whether those "standards" are applied only within an enterprise or across an industry. These techniques enable the specification of

1. business objects and their relationships and representations,
2. business processes and the effects of their operation on business objects,
3. data management systems that control the retention and distribution of information about business objects,
4. computing applications that perform transformations on business objects and the data about them.

A class of technology, e.g., CASE (computer-aided software engineering) tools, repositories, modeling languages, etc., has evolved to support the development of these models. However, the use of these tools to establish effective standards across industry, or even across a single large enterprise, has been limited by the lack of a clear consensus on standards for the exchange of these models.

One of the problems limiting this exchange has been the profusion of modelling languages and tools within the enterprise and hence the high costs of support for relating them, due to the lack of mapping.

These high costs result from such things as:

1. distribution
2. syntactic and semantic diversity
3. interfacing
4. need for reverse engineering
5. redundancy within applications
6. ensuring consistency/correcting inconsistencies
7. maintenance throughout a life cycle.

The alleviation of these problems will meet the overall objective of enabling on-demand interoperability of models. Interoperability here is defined as the ability to relate (statically or dynamically) any model and associated modelling language that there is a need to relate. This involves integration among subject area models through interoperability of separate model components developed using differing modelling languages and possibly stored in and managed by differing data management technologies and repositories/data dictionaries. These models may be distributed across intranets and the Internet. This kind of interoperability will enable a kind of "semantic plug and play" in which users will be able to change their system according to needs without excessive dependency on application knowledge and model configuration.

Several different standards for modeling facilities either exist or are in the process of being approved as international standards, including the following:

1. EXPRESS is a data modeling language defined in Part 11 of ISO 10303, Industrial automation systems and integration - Product data representation and exchange, popularly known as STEP (STandard for the Exchange of Product model data).
2. CDIF (CASE Data Interchange Format), is a standard of EIA (Electronic Industries Association), now a under consideration by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7/WG11 in Drafts 15474 (Parts 1-3), 15475 (Parts 1-3), 15476 (Parts 1-6) and 15477 (Parts 1-2).
3. CSMF (Conceptual Schema Modeling Facilities), a standard for modeling facilities now under development by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC21/WG3.
4. IRDS (Information Resource Dictionary System) is defined in ISO/IEC 10027:1990 and ISO/IEC 10728:1993 as a model repository, which includes a modeling facility.
5. PCTE (Portable Common Tool Environment) is defined in ISO/IEC 13719 as a model repository, which includes a modeling language.
6. ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation 1) is defined in ISO/IEC 8824 as a standard for modeling the abstract syntax of data.

In addition activities are under way both by national standards agencies and by industry consortia to develop standards for modeling languages. Some of these are expected to be offered in the near future for international standardization. These include the following:

1. The IDEF (Integrated Definition Language) family of modeling languages is already a US Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), and is reviewed for US standardization by the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society, which is itself certified by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
2. KIF (Knowledge Interchange Format) and Conceptual Graphs (CGs) are being standardized by ANSI ASC X3T2.
3. SSADM has been standardized by the British Standards Institution (BSI).
4. OMT (Object Modeling Technique) is being developed to support the object-oriented approach to interoperability being developed by the Object Management Group (OMG).

The relationship among these modeling techniques and the associated development activities is currently the source of much confusion. The workshop identified specific problems, including but not limited to the following:

1. ISO TC184/SC4 has developed its own 'integrated' modeling technique (EXPRESS) and tools are being implemented to support it. Other modelling tools, especially those for software engineering, can share data through the export/import format of the CDIF standard. Meanwhile, many vendors are moving ahead to implement a variety of different (and generally not compatible) object-oriented modeling tools.
2. Groups working on IRDS, PCTE, PLIB (ISO TC184/SC4 Parts Library) are independently developing standards for data dictionaries/repositories to manage definitions of different aspects of models.
3. Groups working on CSMF, CDIF, ODP (Open Distributed Processing), IRDS and PCTE are all developing techniques for the integration of models. None addresses the full scope of the problem. For example, CSMF addresses semantic integration of conceptual models/conceptual schemas, CDIF addresses syntactical interchange of models typically created and managed by CASE tools, ODP addresses integration of object-based models of different aspects of information systems, , while IRDS and PCTE address means for storing, cross-referencing and managing models of any kind that can be defined using the facilities of the repository.
4. ISO TC184/SC4 developed its own export/import format for product data exchange, and its own application programming interface (the Standard Data Access Interface or SDAI), with its own bindings to C, C++, and CORBA IDL, independently of the remote database access and export/import facilities being developed by JTC1/SC21/WG3.
5. The OMG has recently issued RFPs (Requests for Proposals) for specifications of facilities for the storage and manipulation of meta-objects and for the exchange of information between object modelling tools.
6. There is no clear responsibility for assuring that tools that conform to the standards for specific domains will interoperate with tools developed for other domains. ISO TC184/SC4 is working to solve this problem within its own broad family of STEP standards.

Although these different modeling languages meet different objectives, there is consensus among the participants in the Joint Workshop that there is significant overlap in the meaning of the constructs of these languages;

The users of modeling technology need to be able to share, integrate and act on models, independently of the language in which those models are originally formulated;

There exists no common interpretation of all standard modeling languages that allows models formulated in one language to be expressed in other languages;

The task of comparing and interrelating standard modeling languages and techniques is complicated by the often significant divergence in meaning of salient terms used by the committees developing those languages;

The terminology of a given modeling language development activity must be suited to the context in which that language is to be used, and therefore it is not feasible to impose a single set of modeling terminology on all modeling language development activities.

Resolutions

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The Joint Workshop reached consensus that the following resolutions will promote the effective standardization, use, exchange, integration and implementation of models and modeling technology.

1. Sharing and Reuse of Standards for Modeling

JWS R1.1. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend that ISO and IEC establish a joint technical supervisory group to identify potential overlap of standards for development and use of models and to recommend action reduce the overlap and/or coordinate the standards.

JWS R1.2. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend that ISO and IEC establish electronic means to support mutual access to model-related work in process across working groups. These means should include topic-based access.

JWS R1.3. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend that ISO and IEC establish market-oriented publishing policies and methods.

These policies and methods should include the following:

1. Publication and dissemination of standards in electronic form, and accessible over the World Wide Web
2. Electronic registration of customer interests
3. Free electronic access to frameworks, glossaries and abstracts
4. Reduction of time from electronic manuscript to global electronic access.

2. Managing Duplication of Standards for Modeling

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JWS R2.1. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend to all its subcommittees and to appropriate technical committees of ISO and IEC, to UN/EDIFACT and to appropriate liaison organizations, that they recognize the proliferation of modeling languages, and the duplication of efforts in producing and using modeling standards.

These affected bodies should review the modeling methods used in their standards with the long term objective of integrating and harmonizing their models towards the production of an open and common ISO repository using standardized services.

JWS R2.2. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend to all its subcommittees and to appropriate technical committees of ISO and IEC, to UN/EDIFACT that they jointly develop a reference document on modeling and the use of models in the design, construction and management of information systems.

This reference document for modeling will relate the major technologies required to enable semantic plug and play. In so doing it serves as a context for positioning existing and future ISO standards development projects related to modeling and understanding their relationships and dependencies.

This reference document for modeling will address:

1. Subject area or application area models e.g., ISO TC184/SC4 STEP, ISO TC184/SC5/WG1 Modeling and Architecture, ISO TC211 Geographic Information/Geomatics. Other areas might include: healthcare, EDI (refer to UN/EDIFACT and Open-edi) and others.
2. Repositories/data dictionaries and CASE tools e.g., ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG22 PCTE and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC21/WG3 IRDS, and related work in OMG, ISO TC184/SC4/WG2, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7/WG11 and UN/EDIFACT.
3. Protocols and other mechanisms for invocation of standard model manipulation services that enable access, transfer and integration of models e.g., ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7/WG11 CDIF/SEDDI and ISO TC184/SC4/WG11 SDAI.
4. Standardized modeling languages with registered meta models e.g., EXPRESS, CDIF data modeling and data flow modeling, and related national standards such as SSADM, IDEF1X, KIF, etc.
5. Standardized common modeling constructs for expressing data, processes and rules, e.g., ISO/IEC JTC1/SC21/WG3 CSMF for conceptual modelling, and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC21/WG7 ODP for information systems.

The following specific requirements will be addressed by this reference document:

1. The general rules for mapping the syntax and semantics between various modeling methodologies (Topic 3, Registration of Metadata, proposes a near-term program to meet this requirement.);
2. the infrastructural services that support and enable the activation or enactment of models;
3. the creation of a formal modeling framework that interrelates the modeling activities of the various standards organizations.

JWS R2.3. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 recommend that JTC1/SC7 conduct a study period to establish the technical basis for a program of work leading to the standardization for the mapping of modeling languages.

The objective of this study is to provide a technical basis for achieving relatively near-term results that conform to the Reference Document to be developed according to JWS R2.2 above. This study shall be open to participation by all subcommittees of JTC1 and all technical committees of ISO, IEC, ITU and UN/EDIFACT. Because of the particular relevance of their work, JTC1/SC7 should extend an explicit invitation to participate in the study to JTC1/SC21, ISO TC184/SC4 and ISO TC184 SC5. The study shall address the following:

1. the mechanisms and processes for the semantic mapping between modeling languages, where "semantic mapping" is understood to be the establishment of a set of rules for the translation of models between languages.
2. the mechanisms for sharing and integrating of models that have been formulated in languages that have been mapped through the mechanisms.
3. the constraints and rules for the usage of modeling languages in order for the models in the respective languages to be integrated through the standard.
4. the use of IRDS and PCTE repository technology to record both models and modelling approaches and to record equivalences between both model components and the components of the definition of each modelling approach. (Examples: (1) relate an entity called "client" in an IDEF1X model to an entity called "Customer" in an SSADM model. (2) relate a modelling concept called 'Entity' in SSADM to the concepts 'Entity' and 'Relationship' in IDEF1X.)

The study shall investigate the use of these mechanisms by applying them to the mapping of EXPRESS and CDIF. This results of the study shall be expressed in the form of a proposal to extend the CDIF data definition and data modeling subject areas (ISO/IEC CD 15476 Parts 3 & 4) to incorporate the additional concepts required by EXPRESS (ISO 10303-11). ISO TC184 and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 shall subsequently and jointly decide whether to issue the proposal for ballot, and the procedures to govern such a ballot.

3. Registration of Metadata

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Considering that more and more standardization committees in various application areas (e.g., IEC SC3B for electronic components, ISO TC29 for manufacturing data, ISO TC184/SC4 for industrial data, UN/EDIFACT for electronic messages) are defining computer readable data element description to specify the meaning of the data involved in information models or standards, often called "meta-data".

The use of different structures for these sets of computer readable descriptions would lead to duplication of work and incompatibility among standards.

World wide web technologies for accessing text are well developed and in use. However the world wide web lacks standards for access to structured meta-data and data.

EDI message structures, their definition and specifications of meaning are not easily available.

It is the view of the Joint Workshop that a registry for metadata in standards should be established. The benefits of establishing such a registry will include:

1. It will ensure the consistency of metadata in standards;
2. it will ensure consistent management among repositories through content modules;
3. it will promote the development of standard metadata;
4. it will provide uniform access to metadata in standards;
5. it will facilitate access to structured data and meta-data via the world wide web;
6. it will facilitate the development of EDI messages and the use of Internet technologies for the transmission of EDI messages.

The use of compatible sets of structures for meta-data, and the collection of all these meta-data within a common registry, will promote the use of the same meta-data across both the standardization and business activities. This will reduce duplication of work and increase the compatibility among all the standards that address electronic data interchange.

JWS R3.1. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 organize a Workshop on Metadata Registration.

The purpose of this workshop is to address the development of this registry of the salient attributes of data models and meta models in relevant International standards.

The workshop should address the following topics:

1. Formulate a template for the submission of such metadata. The template should be developed considering the content of
   1. IEC 1360,
   2. ISO 10303, especially Part 11 (EXPRESS Data Modeling Language), Part 21 (Clear Text Encoding), and Part 22 (Standard Data Access Interface)
   3. ISO 13584,
   4. ISO 14258,
   5. ISO/IEC 10728 IRDS Services Interface,
   6. ISO/IEC 11179,
   7. ISO/IEC 13719 Portable Common Tool Environment,
   8. ISO/IEC CD 13237 Naming and Thesaurus,
   9. ISO/IEC 13645 Guidelines for the Design of IRDS Content Modules,
   10. ANSI dpANS X3.285 Meta-model for management of shareable data,
   11. IEEE P1157 Standard for Health Care data Interchange MEDIX Joint Working Group with a meta-model of shareable data;
   12. EIA CDIF -- EIA/PN-3071 Data Definition and EIA-PN3072 Data Modelling (ISO/IEC CD 15476 Parts 3 & 4).
2. Develop an IRDS content module to specify the content of the registry.
3. Recommend the appointment of a registration authority and the source of funding for such an authority.
4. Address the development of the registry technology and procedures.
5. Address the question of comparison and reconciliation of metadata between standards to ensure consistency.
6. Facilitation of access to structured data and meta-data via the world wide web.
7. Facilitation of access to the definition of the structure and meaning of the elements in EDI messages via the world wide web.

The Joint Workshop further recommends that the responsibility for organizing and leading this Workshop on Metadata Registration should be assigned to JTC1/SC14.

Participation in this workshop shall be open, but because of the particular relevance of their work, JTC1 should extend an explicit invitation to the following:

1. IEC SC3d
2. ISO TC46
3. ISO TC154
4. ISO TC184/SC4/WG2
5. ISO TC184/SC5/WG1
6. ISO TC211
7. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7/WG11.
8. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC14
9. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC21/WG3 CSMF RG
10. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC21/WG3 IRDS RG
11. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG22
12. UN/EDIFACT

JWS R3.2. The Joint Workshop requests that JTC1 change their procedures to include registration of the metadata in standard models as part of the standard publication procedure.