Service Modeling Language
The Service Modeling Language (SML) is a space created by leading IT company standard to describe information about IT systems technically uniform in XML format. These so machine-readable system descriptions should be as uniform and consistent then detected by a variety of system management tools and IT service providers, edited, modified, and used to manage, for example, these IT resources.
Overview
As described below, SML does not offer any definition of IT infrastructure, but is a metalanguage. The display capabilities of IT systems described above should be possible with the help of the Common Model Library ( CML). This should include various implementations of SML, the various IT systems model. Note that the name of CML is to be defined.
SML is a language which has been proposed jointly by the IT companies BEA, BMC, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun in a draft specification.
On 21 March 2007 SML was taken by the W3C, where it is then subjected to a standardization process. SML is based on work that Microsoft three years ago as part of the development of his system definition models had begun (SDM ), which in turn is a part of their system management frameworks Dynamic Systems Initiative.
To define constraints on an XML document, which go beyond the capabilities of XML Schema, SML uses the data structure description language Schematron. Schematron rules that are as XML attributes or as xs: appinfo' added elements to the standard XML schema.
Features
SML offers the following features:
- A profile of XML Schema 1.0
- Schematron to define restrictions
- A mechanism to bind these restrictions types and elements
- Inter- document references ("links" )
- Deref ( ) XPath 1.0 extension in order to express these links in XPath can
- Sml: key, sml: unique, and sml: keyref elements to define ( unique) keys
The only function of SML is the validation of SML documents. The validation checks given XML files, called instances, to one or several SML schemas, the model of the instance. The model is therefore an amalgamation of various files that are referenced to each other.
SML Interchange Format
In addition to the SML standard the standard of the Service Modeling Language Interchange Format, short- SML- IF, the W3C was simultaneously submitted. This is intended for the exchange of SML models between different systems. The salient difference to SML is that the model comes bundled in a file. The individual models are here again incorporated as SML documents.