Detailed Platform Taxonomy


Data Interchange Services | Data Management Services | Graphics and Imaging Services | International Operation Services | Location and Directory Services | Network Services | Operating System Services | Software Engineering Services | Transaction Processing Services | User Interface Services | Security Services | System and Network Management Services | Object-Oriented Provision of Services

This chapter provides a detailed taxonomy of platform services and qualities.

Data Interchange Services

Data interchange services provide specialized support for the interchange of information between applications and the external environment. These services are designed to handle data interchange between applications on the same platform and applications on different (heterogeneous) platforms. An analogous set of services exists for object-oriented data interchange, which can be found under Data Interchange services and Externalization services in Object-Oriented Provision of Services .

The following functional areas are currently supported mainly by Application Software, but are progressing towards migration into the Application Platform:

Data Management Services

Central to most systems is the management of data that can be defined independently of the processes that create or use it, maintained indefinitely, and shared among many processes. Data management services include:

The following functional areas are currently supported mainly by Application Software, but are progressing towards migration into the Application Platform:

Graphics and Imaging Services

Graphics services provide functions required for creating, storing, retrieving, and manipulating images. These services include:

The following functional areas are currently supported mainly by Application Software, but are progressing towards migration into the Application Platform:

International Operation Services

As a practice, information system developers have generally designed and developed systems to meet the requirements of a specific geographic or linguistic market segment, which may be a nation or a particular cultural market. To make that information system viable, or marketable, to a different segment of the market, a full re-engineering process was usually required. Users or organizations that needed to operate in a multi-national or multi-cultural environment typically did so with multiple, generally incompatible information processing systems.

International operation provides a set of services and interfaces that allow a user to define, select, and change between different culturally-related application environments supported by the particular implementation. In general, these services should be provided in such a way that internationalization issues are transparent to the application logic.

The proper working of international operation services depends on all the software entities involved having the capability to:

This requires software entities to be written to a particular style and to be designed from the outset with internationalization in mind.

Location and Directory Services

Location and directory services provide specialized support for locating required resources and for mediation between service consumers and service providers.

The World Wide Web, based on the Internet, has created a need for locating information resources, which currently is mainly satisfied through the use of search engines. Advancements in the global Internet, and in heterogeneous distributed systems, demand active mediation through broker services that include automatic and dynamic registration, directory access, directory communication, filtration, and accounting services for access to resources.

Network Services

Network services are provided to support distributed applications requiring data access and applications interoperability in heterogeneous or homogeneous networked environments.

A network service consists of both an interface and an underlying protocol.

The following functional areas are currently supported mainly by Application Software, but are progressing towards migration into the Application Platform:

Operating System Services

Operating system services are responsible for the management of platform resources, including the processor, memory, files, and input and output. They generally shield applications from the implementation details of the machine. Operating system services include:

Software Engineering Services

The functional aspect of an application is embodied in the programming languages used to code it. Additionally, professional system developers require tools appropriate to the development and maintenance of applications. These capabilities are provided by software engineering services, which include:

Transaction Processing Services

Transaction Processing (TP) services provide support for the online processing of information in discrete units called transactions, with assurance of the state of the information at the end of the transaction. This typically involves predetermined sequences of data entry, validation, display, and update or inquiry against a file or database. It also includes services to prioritize and track transactions. TP services may include support for distribution of transactions to a combination of local and remote processors.

A transaction is a complete unit of work. It may comprise many computational tasks, which may include user interface, data retrieval, and communications. A typical transaction modifies shared resources. Transactions must also be able to be rolled back (that is, undone) if necessary, at any stage. When a transaction is completed without failure, it is committed. Completion of a transaction means either commitment or rollback.

Typically a TP service will contain a transaction manager, which links data entry and display software with processing, database, and other resources to form the complete service.

The sum of all the work done anywhere in the system in the course of a single transaction is called a global transaction. Transactions are not limited to a single Application Platform.

User Interface Services

User interface services define how users may interact with an application. Depending on the capabilities required by users and the applications, these interfaces may include the following:

The services associated with a window system include the visual display of information on a screen that contains one or more windows or panels, support for pointing to an object on the screen using a pointing device such as a mouse or touch-screen, and the manipulation of a set of objects on the screen through the pointing device or through keyboard entry. Other user interfaces included are industrial controls and virtual reality devices.

Security Services

Security services are necessary to protect sensitive information in the information system. The appropriate level of protection is determined based upon the value of the information to the business area end users and the perception of threats to it.

To be effective, security needs to be made strong, must never be taken for granted, and must be designed into an architecture and not bolted on afterwards. Whether a system is standalone or distributed, security must be applied to the whole system. It must not be forgotten that the requirement for security extends not only across the range of entities in a system but also through time.

In establishing a security architecture, the best approach is to consider what is being defended, what value it has, and what the threats to it are. The principal threats to be countered are:

Counters to these threats are provided by the following services:

Security services require other software entities to co-operate in:

Security services are one category where a wide view is particularly important, as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This is one category of services where the external environment has critical implications on the Application Platform. For instance, the presence of a firewall may provide a single point of access onto a network from the outside world, making it possible to concentrate access control in one place and relax requirements behind the firewall.

System and Network Management Services

Information systems are composed of a wide variety of diverse resources that must be managed effectively to achieve the goals of an open system environment. While the individual resources (such as printers, software, users, processors) may differ widely, the abstraction of these resources as managed objects allows for treatment in a uniform manner. The basic concepts of management - including operation, administration, and maintenance - may then be applied to the full suite of information system components along with their attendant services.

System and network management functionality may be divided in several different ways; one way is to make a division according to the management elements that generically apply to all functional resources. This division reduces as follows:

The following functional areas are currently supported mainly by Application Software, but are progressing towards migration into the Application Platform:

This breakout of system and network management services parallels the breakout of emerging OSI network management, thereby presenting an overall coherent framework that applies equally to whole networks and the individual nodes of the networks.

One important consideration of the standards supporting the services in this category is that they should not enforce specific management policies, but rather enable a wide variety of different management policies to be implemented, selected according to the particular needs of the end-user installations.

System and network management services require the co-operation of other software entities in:

Object-Oriented Provision of Services

This section shows how services are provided in an object-oriented manner. "Object Services" does not appear as a category in the Technical Reference Model (TRM) since all the individual object services are incorporated as appropriate in the given service categories.

An object is an identifiable, encapsulated entity that provides one or more services that can be requested by a client. Clients request a service by invoking the appropriate method associated with the object, and the object carries out the service on the client's behalf. Objects provide a programming paradigm that can lead to important benefits, including:

Object management services provide ways of creating, locating, and naming objects, and allowing them to communicate in a distributed environment. The complete set of object services identified so far is listed below for the sake of completeness. Where a particular object service is part of a more generally applicable service category, a pointer to the other service category is given. Object services include:


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