[¤1] Architecture Description Markup Language (ADML)

[¤2] Information for Reviewers

[¤3] This subsection ("Information for Reviewers") provides information relating only to the company review, and will be removed from the published ADML Technical Standard.

[¤4] This page, and the pages to which it links, are intended to duplicate the technical content of the corresponding pages of the MCC web site as of 16th December, 1999. The following changes to these pages have been made:

[¤5] The present page replaces the corresponding page of the MCC documentation, and provides additional context and background to the adoption of ADML as an Open Group Technical Standard.
[¤6] The following global editorial changes have been made:
- [¤7] Copyright changed from MCC to The Open Group
- [¤8] Explicit references to usage permissions dropped (so that usage permissions defer to the default Open Group usage permissions).
- [¤9] References to MCC personnel dropped.
- [¤10] References to "Obtaining ADML from MCC" dropped. (In this Technical Standard, ADML is the name of the standard, not the proprietary technology.)
- [¤11] References to target recipients of error reports changed from MCC to The Open Group. (Error reports will be forwarded to MCC by The Open Group.)
- [¤12] References to the versioning of ADML changed to denote the Technical Standard rather than the MCC developed technology. Specifically, "ADML 1.0" dropped in favour of "ADML Version 1", which is The Open Group Publications house style. At the time of publication of this ADML Technical Standard, the Technical Standard ADML Version 1 is functionally equivalent to the MCC ADML 1.0 technology. The intent of The Open Group is to evolve the ADML Version 1 Technical Standard to incorporate feedback from its use in product. However, MCC is funded by its sponsor organizations, and there is no commitment on the part of MCC to evolve its technology beyond ADML 1.0.
- [¤13] Hyperlinks to MCC's SSEP Home Page changed to link to this page (referred to in this documentation as the "ADML Home Page").

[¤14] Background

[¤15] ADML is a representation language for architecture that was developed by the Micro-electronics and Computer technology Consortium (MCC) as part of its Software and Systems Engineering Productivity (SSEP) project.

[¤16] ADML has been used by MCC in collaboration with The Open Group to develop a proof of concept for a Building Blocks Description Language (BBDL). The Open Group intends this work program to provide a means of defining architectural building blocks in a way that allows their interactions with other building blocks to be captured, and that allows real products to be conformance tested and procured to fulfil the defined functions.

[¤17] The following informative presentations were delivered by MCC to The Open Group at its November 1999 meeting:

[¤18] ADL Overview (MS PowerPoint [reg] presentation)
[¤19] ADML (MS PowerPoint [reg] presentation)

[¤20] An ADML representation of the Appendix J example found within The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF) is also available on the MCC web site.

[¤21] ADML is directly based on ACME, an architecture description language. The principle language design and tool development work for ACME has been undertaken by David Garlan, Bob Monroe, and Drew Kompanek at Carnegie Mellon University, and Dave Wile at USC's Information Sciences Institute. ADML adds to ACME a standardized representation (parsable by ordinary XML parsers), the ability to define links to objects outside the architecture (such as rationale, designs, components, etc.), straightforward ability to interface with commercial repositories, and transparent extensibility.

[¤22] Contents

[¤23] This page provides links to the documentation of the ADML Document Type Definition (DTD), which represents the essence of ADML itself; and to an ADML Document Type Definition (DTD) example.