INTERNATIONAL COORDINATION OF WORK ON SOFTWARE PRODUCT STANDARDS


    Peter Eirich                            February 4, 1992

    Ongoing efforts to harmonize standards that describe the contents of
    software, and its forms of design representation, are illustrative
    of what may be required to harmonize broader classes of product data
    standards, both among themselves and with other types of standards
    applicable to Enterprise Integration.  This paper describes the
    history and anticipated direction of a (currently ad-hoc) activity
    to achieve compatibility among standards for the description of
    software, software tool interoperability, and the management of
    information about software.  As of this writing, active participants
    include:

      1. IEEE Computer Society - Task Force on Professional Computing Tools
      2. EIA - CDIF Technical Committee
      3. IGES/PDES Organization - Software Products Committee
      4. Accredited Stds Committee X3 - Technical Committee X3H4 (ANSI IRDS)
      5. ASC X3 SD3 proposal related to AD/Cycle
      6. ISO IRDS (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC21/WG3)
      7. CALS Industry Steering Group - Software Products Committee

    This activity is also coordinated with a broader ongoing
    Harmonization Around IRDS initiative.  Also, the potential for
    relating this effort with ATIS and PCTE standardization activities
    has increased due to the recent initiation of X3H6 under ASC X3.

    In addition to describing the overall coordination activity and its
    relationship to established standards organziations, this paper
    discusses the technical approaches for model harmonization that have
    been employed experimentally in several working sessions.