Chapter 3 Schema Design and Implementation

Schema design is the process wherein real-world entities (such as processors, disks, software, or user accounts) are transformed into a logical representation. The schema contains three kinds of information:

Since real-world entities have attributes (properties) about themselves and actions (methods) they can perform, these are also aspects of the design of a schema.

A further aspect to consider is that some entities are actually specialized types of other entities.

A well-understood schema encompassing all these considerations is critical for interoperable platform-independent WBEM-based management application interaction with managed resources.

To ensure interoperability between clients and providers, it is vital that developers base their designs on standardized schemas. While a given management application and associated managed resource provider(s) could decide to standardize on some private schema, this is very likely to result in redundant information being provided and an inability for clients and providers to share information in an interoperable manner. As noted in the introduction of this document, the DMTF has defined the Common Information Model (CIM), a common data model of an implementation-neutral schema for describing overall management information in a network/enterprise environment. Using this common CIM schema enables general-purpose management clients to use a common representation of managed objects, even without prior knowledge of the providers implementing the schema. Developing with this common CIM schema lets providers add application-specific value-added functions while still supporting general-purpose clients. For example, the provider could implement an OS-specific function, while also exposing a CIM-compliant view of general OS capabilities.