Musings on the Information Framework (SID)

I have been spending more time (at least for me) at home lately.  My wife, Jeannie, and I like to cook together on the weekends.  So, we thought we might dust off an old recipe or two, and see if we could enhance them a little, while keeping true to the concept.  We both enjoy lasagna, and I get the job of making home-made lasagna noodles, a real chore!  Eggplant is a favorite of ours, so I thought why not save a little time and try eggplant instead of noodles in constructing the layers.  What a treat that we believe is a souped-up version of eggplant parmesan / lasagna.

This got me thinking about the Information Framework (SID).  There are some areas, such as Party (which we are doing a bit of work on), Location, and a couple of others that haven’t been touched (much) since they were first developed.  It looks like we are going to introduce the EntitySpecification/Entity and the CharacteristicSpecification/CharacteristicValue to the Party model, souping-up the current PartyRoleType entity.  If you are interested you may want to take a look at

http://www.tmforum.org/community/groups/information_framework_sid/forum/p/151104/165016.aspx#165016

This type of change really only affects PartyRoleType and not the rest of the Party model, and provides the advantage of enabling the dynamic addition of new types of roles.  As such, it still maintains as much backward compatibility as possible, which is important to those who have already used/implemented the Party model.

Another area of the SID that could benefit from these two patterns is the Place (Location) model.  Currently there are only example sub-classes for certain types of addresses, such as Australian, Japanese, and US property addresses.  Adding these two patterns would enable any type of address, or any type of Location, to be dynamically defined, while still preserving what is currently in the model.

Business Interaction is another.  It has the “stub” of a specification that has not been developed, but no characteristics.

I am certain there are other areas of the SID that warrant dusting-off, and would like to hear from others about what they might be.  And, it would also be good to know if any of you would like to participate in enhancing the SID in these areas.

I’ll be doing a quick turn-around once I arrive home this weekend, and then off to Germany on Monday and back on Friday.

And, I hope to see many of you at Management World Orlando 2010, at which you may be interested in attending one of the many courses offered.