Systems Management: Common Information Model (CIM)
Copyright © 1998 The Open Group

Frontmatter


Open Group Technical Standard
Systems Management: Common Information Model (CIM)
Document Number: C804
ISBN: 1-85912-255-8
Incorporates DMTF Errata 2.0.2, 26 July 1998


©August 1998, The Open Group All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.


This document is published by The Open Group under the terms and conditions of its agreement with the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF), and its participating contributors:

Compaq Computer Corp. Computer Associates International, Inc Hewlett-Packard Company Intel Corporation Microsoft Corporation Novell, Inc. Sun Microsystems, Inc. Tivoli Systems, An IBM Company.


Any comments relating to the material contained in this document may be submitted to The Open Group at:

The Open Group
Apex Plaza
Forbury Road
Reading
Berkshire, RG1 1AX
United Kingdom
or by electronic mail to:
OGSpecs@opengroup.org

Preface

The Open Group

The Open Group is the leading vendor-neutral, international consortium for buyers and suppliers of technology. Its mission is to cause the development of a viable global information infrastructure that is ubiquitous, trusted, reliable, and as easy-to-use as the telephone. The essential functionality embedded in this infrastructure is what we term the IT DialTone. The Open Group creates an environment where all elements involved in technology development can cooperate to deliver less costly and more flexible IT solutions.

Formed in 1996 by the merger of the X/Open Company Ltd. (founded in 1984) and the Open Software Foundation (founded in 1988), The Open Group is supported by most of the world's largest user organizations, information systems vendors, and software suppliers. By combining the strengths of open systems specifications and a proven branding scheme with collaborative technology development and advanced research, The Open Group is well positioned to meet its new mission, as well as to assist user organizations, vendors, and suppliers in the development and implementation of products supporting the adoption and proliferation of systems which conform to standard specifications.

With more than 200 member companies, The Open Group helps the IT industry to advance technologically while managing the change caused by innovation. It does this by:

The Open Group operates in all phases of the open systems technology lifecycle including innovation, market adoption, product development, and proliferation. Presently, it focuses on seven strategic areas: open systems application platform development, architecture, distributed systems management, interoperability, distributed computing environment, security, and the information superhighway. The Open Group is also responsible for the management of the UNIX trademark on behalf of the industry.

Development of Product Standards

This process includes the identification of requirements for open systems and, now, the IT DialTone, development of Technical Standards (formerly CAE and Preliminary Specifications) through an industry consensus review and adoption procedure (in parallel with formal standards work), and the development of tests and conformance criteria.

This leads to the preparation of a Product Standard which is the name used for the documentation that records the conformance requirements (and other information) to which a vendor may register a product.

The "X" Device is used by vendors to demonstrate that their products conform to the relevant Product Standard. By use of the Open Brand they guarantee, through the Open Brand Trade Mark License Agreement (TMLA), to maintain their products in conformance with the Product Standard so that the product works, will continue to work, and that any problems will be fixed by the vendor.

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Readers should note that Corrigenda may apply to any publication. Corrigenda information is published on the World-Wide Web at http://www.opengroup.org/corrigenda.

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This Document
This Technical Standard is a joint publication with the Desktop Management Task force. The Common Information Model (CIM) is an approach to the management of systems and networks that applies the basic structuring and conceptualization techniques of the object-oriented paradigm. This approach uses a uniform modeling formalism that, together with the basic repertoire of object-oriented constructs, supports the cooperative development of an object-oriented schema across multiple organizations. This enables sharing of information in systems and across networks.

CIM consists of a language definition (this document), that describes the various constructs and techniques used to model resources, together with a set of schema that describe how specific resources are represented. The set of schema are provided to establish a common framework that describes the managed environment. The management schema consists of:

Revision History
This Technical Standard is the formally adopted Open Group publication of the DMTF CIM version 2.0 specification.

It includes the revisions specified in DMTF Errata 2.0.2, dated 26 June 1998.

Audience
This specification is intended for implementers of the Common Information Model (CIM) for sharing of information in systems and across networks.
Structure

A Glossary and Index are also provided.

Trademarks

Motif®, OSF/1®, UNIX®, and the "X Device"® are registered trademarks and IT DialToneTM; and The Open GroupTM; are trademarks of The Open Group in the U.S. and other countries.

Microsoft®, Windows®, Windows 95®, Windows NT®, ActiveX®, and Visual Basic® are registered trademarks, and Visual C++TM; is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

Acknowledgements

This Technical Standard is the formally adopted Open Group publication of the DMTF CIM version 2.0 specification.

The Open Group acknowledges the work of the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF) Common Information Model (CIM) project members of the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF), in their development of the CIM version 2.0 specification.

The following companies provided the members of the DMTF CIM project team:

Compaq Computer Corp. Computer Associates International, Inc. Hewlett-Packard Company Intel Corporation Microsoft Corporation Novell, Inc. Sun Microsystems, Inc. Tivoli Systems, Inc.

The Open Group acknowledges the leadership and technical editing work of Raymond Williams (Tivoli Systems) in the DMTF CIM project.

Referenced Documents

The following documents are referenced in this Technical Standard:

DCE RPC

CAE Specification, August 1994, X/Open DCE: Remote Procedure Call (ISBN: 1-85912-041-5, C309), published by The Open Group.

This specification is now also ISO International Standard ISO/IEC 11578:1996, Information technology - Open Systems Interconnection - Remote Procedure Call (RPC)

UTF-8

CAE Specification, April 1995, File System Safe UCS Transformation Format (UTF-8) (ISBN: 1-85912-082-2, C501), published by The Open Group.

UNICODE Standard, Version 2

The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard, Worldwide Character Encoding Version 2.0, Volume One, Addison-Wesley, 1996.

ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985

Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic.

ISO 639

ISO 639:1988, Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages, Bilingual edition.

RFC 2234

Augmented BNF (Backus-Naur Form) for Syntax Specifications: ABNF, November 1997.

RFC 2279

UTF-8 - a Universal Transformation Format for multi-octet characters defined by ISO/IEC 10646 (UCS - Universal Character Set), January 1998.


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