Service Modeling Language

OK, this is one in a long list of things on my personal radar that I haven't covered recently - July Computerworld article on the new semantic standard for CMDBs. Mercury's recent acquisition by HP only adds momemtum to this effort.

Note that IBM is positioning Rational as the tools platform here. That is the right decision - no need to go off and create a whole new modeling paradigm for CMDBs. I have also seen this standard favorably mentioned on internal OMG lists. Hopefully something like Model-driven configuration management is only a year or two away...

See here for the spec and XML schema. What I see in the (quite brief) schema appears to be a sort of language kernel or skeleton, written at a very high level of abstraction; intuitively it seems to me that the committee is sort of at a meta-meta-model level - figuring out how they are going to describe the descriptions, by enhancing the XML core with things like inter-document references and assertions.

At that level, it's not possible for a potential consumer like me to make any judgement about the spec's utility. If it remains a non-value-add academic exercise that leaves all the tangible things in my universe of discourse (like, oh, say Server and Application) to implementers, then it is a standard only in the way that XML as a whole is a "standard," and we will be faced with many different flavors, all too likely vendor specific. I assume that there is much more on the way, and the final product will be more on the order of the OMG's standards, which are of reasonable intelligibility to an IT practitioner.

-Charlie