Ellen Jean Stokes

Toward a Formal Common Information Model Ontology

Self-managing systems will be highly dependent upon information acquired from disparate applications, devices, components and subsystems. To be effectively managed, such information will need to conform to a common model. One standard that provides a common model for describing disparate computer and network information is the Common Information Model (CIM). Although CIM defines the models necessary for inferring properties about distributed systems, its specification as a semi-formal ontology limits its ability to support important requirements of a self-managing distributed system including knowledge interoperability and aggregation, as well as reasoning. To support these requirements, there is a need to model, represent and share CIM as a formal ontology. In this paper, we propose a framework for constructing a CIM ontology based upon previous research that identified mappings from Unified Modeling Language (UML) constructs to ontology language constructs. We extend and apply these mappings to a UML representation of the CIM Schema in order to derive a semantically valid and consistent formal CIM ontology.

An enterprise directory solution with DB2

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is a technology that can provide directory services to a range of applications. Directory service, a critical part of distributed computing, is the central point where network services, security services, and applications can form an integrated distributed computing environment. The simplicity of LDAP enables users to store and retrieve data easily from the directory. Nevertheless, as the use of directory services becomes more widespread, directories will need to scale to support millions of entries and millions of user requests with subsecond predictable performance. LDAP directories can be implemented using various storage mechanisms such as flat files, b-trees, or databases. This paper discusses an implementation of LDAP that uses the IBM DATABASE 2TM relational database as the data store and query engine to meet the directory service requirements. Performance analysis is provided to show that a relational database can be used to successfully meet the performance and scale needs of an LDAP directory while remaining secure and competitive with other vendor implementations.

Cool to Critical: Managing Web Services Now

Web services are no longer just hype — they are being sanctioned by the industry on two fronts, standards and products. IBM is investing time, talent, and money on both these fronts, establishing itself as an industry leader. Web services are being developed as the foundation of a new generation of business-to-business and application integration architectures. This places Web services technologies in a business critical role within most enterprises. The corollary to this is that the Web services and the applications that use them must be manageable, from end to end, through the firewalls. The business-to-business Web services applications require management solutions in kind. They must be platform and technology agnostic, available through firewall, internet friendly, and flexible. This presents new challenges and opportunities to management vendors.