Heterogeneity has been the curse of the IT industry and systems management is no exception. As organizations are expanding their global business, and new technology and platforms are being introduced, the complexity of systems management is increasing rapidly due to heterogeneity and getting unified view of IT environments is becoming more difficult. To simplify and expedite information integration, this paper brings best practices of model-driven system and information integration to the problems of information integration in systems management. Specifically, we present an open framework for describing meta-model of a new component in isolation using UML and relating it with meta-models of other components through semantic relationships. The resulting integrated meta-model together with querying mechanisms for various sources can federate automatically and on-demand, integrated model of IT environment without relying on a central database repository.

The authors present M(DM), an extensible metalevel system in which the syntax and the semantics of data models, schemas, and databases can be uniformly represented. M(DM) consists primarily of a set of metatypes that capture and express data-model constructs in second-order logic: a data model is represented as a collection of M(DM) metatypes. To achieve extensibility, M(DM)'s metatypes are organized into an inheritance lattice. The robustness and openness of the approach are demonstrated by expressing a variety of data models in M(DM), and the authors show how to exploit M(DM)'s metalevel capabilities for hiding representational heterogeneities in multimodel multidatabase systems.>

Abstract In the present‐day graphics field, a proper methodology for designing input constructs of a general purpose graphics system is needed. In this direction, this paper proposes a framework where the graphics interaction programming is formulated as event‐driven procedures. The end‐user actions on the input tools are represented as events and the programreactions to these events as action‐processes. The constructs for programming in this framework are implemented as a part of a graphics package SODDI. The resultant programming facilities are compared with the other existing proposals, based on the conceptual differences of the respective frameworks as well as on the experiences in using the constructs. The data‐structures used for implementing these constructs are also presented.