The ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing - An Introduction

by Kazi Farooqui(1), Luigi Logrippo(1), Jan de Meer(2)

(1) Department of Computer Science, University of Ottawa
(2) Research Institute for Open Communication Systems Berlin (GMD-FOKUS)
1994

Abstract:

The ISO Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) consists
of four parts - an Overview of the reference model, the Descriptive
Model, the Pre scriptive Model, and the Architectural Semantics. The four
parts provide the con cepts and rules of distributed processing to ensure
openness between interacting distributed application components. Openness
is a combination of characteristics, i.e. scalability, accessibility,
heterogeneity, autonomy and distribution.

The RM-ODP introduces the concept of viewpoint to describe a system from
a particular set of concerns, and hence to deal with the complexity
of distributed sys tems. While all the viewpoints are relevant to
the description and design of distributed systems, the computation
and engineering models are the ones that bear most directly on the
design and implementation of distributed systems. From a distributed
software engineering point of view, the com putational and engineering
viewpoints are the most important; they reflect the software structure
of the distributed application most closely. In this introductory paper,
we concentrate on the computational and engineering viewpoints.