Toward a Formal Common Information Model Ontology

Self-managing systems will be highly dependent upon information acquired from disparate applications, devices, components and subsystems. To be effectively managed, such information will need to conform to a common model. One standard that provides a common model for describing disparate computer and network information is the Common Information Model (CIM). Although CIM defines the models necessary for inferring properties about distributed systems, its specification as a semi-formal ontology limits its ability to support important requirements of a self-managing distributed system including knowledge interoperability and aggregation, as well as reasoning. To support these requirements, there is a need to model, represent and share CIM as a formal ontology. In this paper, we propose a framework for constructing a CIM ontology based upon previous research that identified mappings from Unified Modeling Language (UML) constructs to ontology language constructs. We extend and apply these mappings to a UML representation of the CIM Schema in order to derive a semantically valid and consistent formal CIM ontology.