Information Exchange Framework (IEF) Working Group

THIS PAGE IS IN THE PROCESS OF BEING UPDATED TO REFLECT THE CURRENT STATE OF THE EFFORT. REFER TO THE MARS WIKI http://www.omgwiki.org/mars/ FOR LATEST INFO ON THE IEF EFFORT.

The kernel for the development of the concept of an Information Exchange Framework or IEF came out of recent work over the past few years within the OMG and companion standards organizations, such as the W3C and The Open Group. Within the Realtime, Embedded and Specialized Systems (RTESS) and MARS Platform Task Forces, we have a set of information exchange mechanisms that have developed to now include such standards as the Data Distribution Services (DDS) for Real-Time. The incorporation of the BPMI into the OMG now brings with it the means to address policy mechanisms and controls. Within several Domain Task Forces (DTFs), such as C4I, Healthcare, Space, and Finance, there has been considerable work going on in the standardization of a managed exchange of information for their various domain users. And within the several of the Platform and Domain Special Interest Groups (PSIG/DSIG), such as Software Assurance (SwA) and Ontology that have been working on standards that apply in the policy space. We now see the opportunity to bring together some of these separate standardization efforts to provide for a general purpose solution with which to focus the common elements of the problem of policy based information exchange.

As discussed at the Santa Clara meeting, Dec/08, a work in progress white paper was tabled and discussed. Suggested comments for edit were made by the group. IEF chairs agreed to make the changes and post the paper for comment and feed back to them. The paper is posted here. Feed back should be provided to Craig Campbell [I will collect initial comments on this post] or Paul Work. mars_08-12-12_ief_white_paper_draft_v0.18_8_december08.doc

UPDATE: A newer, much improved version of the IEF WP is available for review and comment. It is the result of inputs received during the IEF WG meeting and MARS Plenary at the WashDC meeting last March 2009. It is available for download from here: http://www.omg.org/docs/mars/09-03-11.doc

The IEF has 3 key elements which are illustrated in the figure below. The first is the Exchange Mechanisms and Services element which focuses on the standards that apply to the distribution and transliteration of information. The second is the Policy Management and Enforcement which covers the standards that apply to discovery, filtering, correlation / aggregation, de-confliction, and Quality of Service as applied to information exchange. The third element is associated with the models of information, are specific to the individual domains.