3.1 Using OMT as a notation for ODP viewpoint languages

 Today, specifications of managed object class interfaces may be described in three different incompatible ways, depending on the kind of management architecture being used for implementing these managed objects: The Internet management architecture uses object-based ASN.1 templates as a notation for managed objects while the OSI framework specifies its MOCs in GDMO/ASN.1 templates in an object-oriented way; CORBA (managed) objects, finally, are defined in OMG IDL. This heterogeneity in the domain of management architectures introduces additional complexity for an integrated management. As ODP-based GAMOCs and the MOCs derived from them should be applicable to every management architecture, it is necessary to specify them in an architecture-independent ``meta-notation''. The independence from the concrete information models of the underlying management architectures is therefore assured.

During the recent years, the Object Modeling Technique (OMT (Rumbaugh et al., 1991)) has been successfully applied to a wide range of software engineering projects and is currently in widespread use in the telecommunications domain: The Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture (TINA, (de la Fuente and Walles, 1994)) makes use of the OMT modeling capabilities for the specification of object classes useful for managing telecommunication entities. A similar approach to modeling abstract ODP classes is described in (Colban and Dupuy, 1995). Currently, OMT is enhanced by new features of other object-oriented methodologies and will end up in the Unified Modeling Language (Booch et al., 1996).

As OMT has proven its usefulness, powerful OMT-compliant CASE-tools which facilitate the complex modeling process are available on the market. Adequate tool support is the prerequisite for a structured design of large-scale software development projects, in particular, if numerous objects and their relationships have to be modeled. Since this is the case in the application management domain, we decided to use OMT for our modeling purposes. Our approach makes use of OMT as a notation for the MOCs derived from the computational and engineering viewpoint concepts and permits a seamless transition from abstract object models to concrete implementations in CORBA. This is due to the fact that OMT-compliant CASE-tools available on the market allow the automatic transformation of OMT models into the notations of standardized management architectures (at least in OMG IDL). A rapid-prototyping approach for the development of CORBA-based management agents can therefore be realized.

The concept of using CORBA as an implementation technique is backed by the liaison statements between the Object Management Group (OMG) and the ISO: It is likely that some CORBAservices may become ODP functions; in turn, the OMG will adopt the ODP trader specification as a CORBAservice. There is a strong agreement between the OMG and the ODP working groups to merge their standards in order to deliver a consistent framework for the specification and development of distributed object-oriented applications.