[rm-wg] OGF Ref Model Group

[Strong, Paul]

When: Friday, September 28, 2007 8:00 AM-9:00 AM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada).
Where: Con-call

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All,
Next Meeting
When: Fri 28th September 2007, 8AM PDT, 11AM EDT, 4PM BST, 3PM GMT

Duration : 1 hour

Where: 
Con-call - The pass code is 2051278. UK:+44-800-085-6481, US: +1 888 237 8573. 
Glance - http://rmwg.glance.net, pass code 0928.
Agenda:
It's about time we recovered from the post summer torpor! Dave and I have been active in our organizations building things that use the reference model, or at least something like it, and we have some thoughts I think we'd like to share before we make the push for publishing the document. 
Specifically from my point of view -
*	Whilst the notion of a pattern DAG, a DAG of managed components and the logical DAG of the components that manage is very useful in describing a conceptual view of how things fit together, the sub-classing of Grid Components into Managed, Pattern and Manager Grid Components within the UML seems to be less useful or rather less actionable. It may be that Pattern and Manager sub-classes are appropriate, but it seems unnecessary to have the notion of Managed, as all Grid Components can be managed. Anyway, we should discuss.

*	Grid Component state. Here we have found that we are using two types of state, an operational state and an admin state. These are summary states with the complete "state" reflected by the various attributes of the Grid Component. I am actually uncomfortable with the notion of Admin state because it couples the life cycle of the Grid Component too closely to an implemented process. It would be good to discuss though.

*	State & Configuration. A couple of months back there was an interesting discussion on State vs Configuration on the OGSA alias. At eBay we have in fact created State and Configuration classes. The existing UML uses stereotypes to effectively categorize configuration and state related attributes. At eBay we have separate classes to capture these. Each Grid Component has both State and Configuration. Our definition is that Configuration attributes are those that can be directly externally manipulated and that define the behavior of the Grid Component. State attributes are typically those that are set internally (although changes in them may be externally driven) and reflect differences in the state of the Grid Component that are interesting to an external observer/client (user or manager). This State class is separate from the state attribute that reflects where in the life-cycle the Grid Component is. This may or may not make sense and a discussion would be useful.

*	Instantiation and Interaction Dependencies. The UML is currently incomplete because it does not allow the sub-classing of association classes. Association classes may be sub-classes of other classes though. So we would have to change the way we represent things. Thus we would have to have Instantiation and Interaction Dependencies as abstract super classes that we sub-class until we reach leaf classes that can then be Association Classes. Whilst it is certainly out of scope at present to discuss how we could serialize the model, in one of my projects we are using RDF and OWL DL. RDF allows us to sub-class classes of relationships in a much cleaner and more obvious way. The notion of classes of relationships and allowing these relationships to have their own attributes is of fundamental importance. In our CMDB work I am pushing heavily for relationships to be fully fledged CIs. Another thing we should discuss. 
Other than that we need to pick up momentum again before OGF21 in Seattle, so that we can have a document that is in a state to review/comment upon. I don't think we have much to do conceptually, but we do need to get the above resolved and written down.
We should also get up to date on he latest GLUE work.

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