A Type Management System for Open Distributed Processing

A goal of Open Distributed Processing (ODP) is to allow the interconnection of existing heterogeneous systems and to support the introduction of new services at run-time (to allow for system evolution). One of the greatest problems in achieving this goal is managing the heterogeneity of the environment. The Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) introduces a Type Repository function as a support for overcoming this problem by providing a framework for describing and relating the types of information, services and entities in an open distributed system. This report presents a brief overview of type description and type management in RM-ODP, and focuses on the development of a type model and strategies for type management for use in an open distributed environment. It considers related approaches in object-oriented databases, persistent programming, and distributed system architectures, and evaluates them with respect to the requirements of ODP. It further considers issues related to the construction of a Type Manager providing tools for type description and type management to operate in an open distributed environment. yThe work reported in this paper has been funded in part by the Cooperative Research Centres Program through the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet of the Commonwealth Government of Australia. It was also partially supported by an Australian Government Postgraduate Research Scholarship (APRA).