Overview Portability and Interoperability
The coarsest breakdown of the Technical Reference Model is shown in Figure 1 below, which shows three major entities (Applications, Application Platform, and Communications Infrastructure) connected by two interfaces (Application Platform Interface and Communications Infrastructure Interface).
Figure 1: Technical Reference Model - High-Level View
The diagram says nothing about the detailed relationships between the entities, only that they exist.
Each of the elements in this diagram is discussed in detail under The Technical Reference Model in Detail.
The high-level Technical Reference Model seeks to emphasise two major common architectural objectives:
Both of these goals are essential to enable integration within the enterprise and trusted interoperability on a global scale between enterprises.
In particular, the high-level model seeks to reflect the increasingly important role of the Internet as the basis for inter- and intra-enterprise interoperability.
The horizontal dimension of the model in Figure 1 represents diversity, and the shape of the model is intended to emphasise the importance of minimum diversity at the interface between the application platform and the communications infrastructure.
This in turn means focusing on the core set of services that can be guaranteed to be supported by every IP-based network, as the foundation on which to build today's interoperable enterprise computing environments.
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