Service Modeling Language

The Service Modeling Language (SML) is a created by leading IT companies default to information about IT - systems technically uniform in XML to describe format. These machine-readable system descriptions should then be recorded, processed, changed and used in a uniform and consistent manner using a wide variety of system management tools and IT service providers , for example to manage these IT resources .

overview

As described under [1], SML itself does not provide a definition of IT infrastructure, but is a metalanguage . The above-described display options for the IT systems should be possible using the Common Model Library (CML). This should include various implementations of SML that model various IT systems. Please note that the name CML has yet to be defined [2].

SML is a language that has been proposed jointly by IT companies BEA , BMC , Cisco , Dell , EMC , HP , IBM , Intel , Microsoft and Sun in a draft specification .

On March 21, 2007, SML was accepted by the W3C and is now subject to a standardization process. SML is based on work that Microsoft began three and a half years ago in the course of developing its System Definition Model (SDM), which in turn is part of their systems management framework Dynamic Systems Initiative .

In order to define restrictions for an XML document that go beyond the possibilities of XML Schema , SML uses the data structure description language Schematron . Schematron rules are added to the usual XML schema as XML attributes or as 'xs: appinfo' elements.

Features

SML offers the following features [1]:

• A profile of XML Schema 1.0
• Schematron for defining constraints
• A mechanism to attach these restrictions to types and elements
• Inter-Document References ("Links")
• deref () : an XPath 1.0 extension to express these links in XPath
• sml: key , sml: unique , and sml: keyref elements for defining (unique) keys

The only function of SML is to validate SML documents. The validation checks given XML files, the so-called instances, against one or more SML schemes, the model of the instance. The model is therefore an amalgamation of different files that are referenced to one another.

SML interchange format

In addition to the SML standard, the standard of the Service Modeling Language Interchange Format , or SML-IF for short, was submitted to the W3C at the same time . This is intended for the exchange of SML models between different systems. The main difference to SML is that the model is bundled in one file. The individual sub-models are in turn incorporated as SML documents.

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1. http://blogs.technet.com/pratul/archive/2006/08/16/447257.aspx
2. http://blogs.technet.com/servicedesk/archive/2007/03/26/cmdb-modeling-the-it-environment.aspx

Web links

• Official SML website of the W3C specification can be found here
• Hewlett Packard Press Releases August 1st, 2006 The announcement of the future standard in the wording of the official communal press text of the initiators with quotes from all responsible managers (first source of Wikipedia entry)
• Eclipsepedia provides an overview of SML and SML-IF and the support of SML by the COSMOS project.