RE: Innovative use of DIAL for IT management

Purely my own thoughts on this...
 
-     How is interoperability provided concerning the terms used within
the adapter? For example, "Device" may have a different meaning for the
network devices than for digital camera or projector.
 
The article does not address the issue of vocabularies/ontologies for
device concepts. Within specific management domains this may be
standardised, such as prescribed branches of the SNMP MIB. But the
article does not elaborate on the issue. The discussion on this issue is
best addressed to the author (who appears to have a particular expertise
in the area of network management metadata).
 
-     Is a document compliant to DIAL if it is XML format?
 
No. The fragments being generated by the adaptors could, as suggested,
be valid subsets of a DIAL document. As DIAL is itself an XML language,
the adaptors must also be producing XML. In particular, the author
suggests the representation of management data by transforming to XML
and from there to an XHTML 2 object. Nothing is said about how such
objects should be adapted for rendering purposes. DIAL merely provides a
presentation format that is adaptable, specifically by providing the
ability to select/remove subsets of a DIAL document based on contextual
information. But suppose you decide to select an <object>, then what?
Nothing in DIAL says how individual elements or structures should be
adapted to the target presentation. It is up to individual adaptation
technologies to decide what to do. DIAL merely provides a common
authoring language to support adaptation, it does not provide the
specifics of the adaptation process. (I am excluding here the facilities
provided by DISelect, which forms part of DIAL.) In essence, the article
is describing how the management data could be captured and represented
in DIAL, but does not explore how such DIAL instances (containing
extremely domain-specific structures) would be transformed for
presentation on a PC browser. Putting the data into <object> elements
does not answer the question of rendering.
 
-     Following this approach, it is required to have a Java program for
each proprietary format of each device, right or have I missed
something?
 
Yes. That is my understanding too. Though I suspect that since there are
only a handful of generally deployed network-based resource management
technologies, re-use or inheritance of code is probably viable.


---Rotan

________________________________

From: www-di-request@w3.org [mailto:www-di-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
Christian Timmerer (ITEC)
Sent: 18 October 2006 15:29
To: Rhys.Lewis@volantis.com; 'Smith, Kevin, VF-Group'; www-di@w3.org
Cc: christian.timmerer@itec.uni-klu.ac.at
Subject: RE: Innovative use of DIAL for IT management



 

Dear Rhys,

  thanks for your reply and clarification. However, I'm sure that
members of the DIWG read this article and could probably share their
view on this thread.

 

Thanks.

Best regards,

 -Christian

 

:--

:- Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Christian Timmerer

:- Department of Information Technology (ITEC)

:- Klagenfurt University, Austria

:- http://research.timmerer.com

:----------------------------------------------------------

 

>> Visit the IT Campus Carinthia

>> http://www.it-campus.at

 

From: www-di-request@w3.org [mailto:www-di-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
Rhys Lewis
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 2:17 PM
To: Christian Timmerer (ITEC); Smith, Kevin, VF-Group; www-di@w3.org
Subject: RE: Innovative use of DIAL for IT management

 

Hi Christian, 

 

Kevin didn't actually write the article, he merely pointed us to it. I
think you probably need to ask Stephen B. Morris, the author.
Unfortunately, Stephen is not a member of DIWG, so can't be reached via
this mailing list.

 

Best wishes

Rhys Lewis, chair DIWG

 

________________________________

From: www-di-request@w3.org [mailto:www-di-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
Christian Timmerer (ITEC)
Sent: 17 October 2006 10:54
To: 'Smith, Kevin, VF-Group'; www-di@w3.org
Cc: christian.timmerer@itec.uni-klu.ac.at
Subject: RE: Innovative use of DIAL for IT management

 

 

Dear Kevin,

   thanks for this article which is very interesting. The article
describes how information (in a proprietary format like key-value pairs
or comma-separated values) from different devices is transformed into
XML format using a Java program(s). The claim is - as I understood it -
that this XML document is compliant to DIAL.

 

I have some questions/comments:

-     How is interoperability provided concerning the terms used within
the adapter? For example, "Device" may have a different meaning for the
network devices than for digital camera or projector.

-     Is a document compliant to DIAL if it is XML format?

-     Following this approach, it is required to have a Java program for
each proprietary format of each device, right or have I missed
something?

 

To be honest, I'm missing the last step, i.e., between the "Adapter" and
the "Web browser on the PC".

 

Thank you.

Best regards,

 -Christian

 

:--

:- Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Christian Timmerer

:- Department of Information Technology (ITEC)

:- Klagenfurt University, Austria

:- http://research.timmerer.com

:----------------------------------------------------------

 

>> Visit the IT Campus Carinthia

>> http://www.it-campus.at

 

From: www-di-request@w3.org [mailto:www-di-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of
Smith, Kevin, VF-Group
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 2:54 PM
To: www-di@w3.org
Subject: Innovative use of DIAL for IT management

 

          Stephen B Morris has posted an innovative use for DIAL at  IBM
developerworks: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-dial/

	He posits  "DIAL provides what might become a standard data
platform for IT management.", which is a very exciting, if unexpected,
application!

	 

	Cheers

	Kevin