Distributed object repositories: concepts and standards

Abstract

Object technology in general and object frameworks in particular are influencing the evolution of enterprise modeling, software development tool integration, repository architectures and distributed heterogeneous computing. A repository is the basis for data/object sharing and integration for application as well as business objects in an information systems environment.

This paper discusses object oriented repository architectures influenced by OMG CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and Microsoft COM (Component Object Model) that supports extensibility and reuse in a distributed application development environment. This paper summarizes key object repository concepts and related work in standardizing core meta data management interfaces and object oriented meta models such as the OMG Meta Object Facility (MOF) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This paper has been influenced by R&D efforts at Unisys, IBM, Microsoft as well as on going work at the Object Management Group (Meta Object Facility) and earlier efforts of ECMA PCTE and ANSI X3H4 IRDS repository efforts. Representative architectures for object repositories for CORBA and COM based repositories are briefly described.

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