The paper describes ttre background to tire CDIF (CASE Data Interchange Format) standards" ~[lbrt, the CDIF architecture, the set of components.lorming the CDIF standards./hmiO', and the current status o1 their development. It also describes some of the coordination that is being carried out with other standardization ~[Jbrts around tire worht.
~omputer-aided sol?ware engineering, CASE, standards, data interchange
OBJECTIVES OF CDIF
The objective of the CASE Data Interchange Format (CDIF) Technical Committee is to produce a set of standards that will enable computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools to interchange information in a standard format. This requires not only the definition of the format itself, but an agreement of the semantics of the information being exchanged.
The interchange format must be neutral and methodindependent, but able to support the semantics required by many different methods. It must be extensible to enable semantics not covered in the standards to be conveyed. mechanism; all that was required was to define the semantics of the required extensions. This position was presented to the EDIF Technical Committee, and they agreed to the formation of a new working group to perform this work, called EDIF/CASE. This group met regularly and started the development of the standard.
By early 1988, several papers had been put forward proposing extensions to EDIF to cover different aspects of the CASE world, and one vendor had developed a prototype interface between its product and that of another vendor, based on its proposals.
It became apparent after a while that the scope and complexity of the task was considerable, and was of a similar scale to the existing EDIF standard. It was felt that it was not appropriate to remain a working group within the EDIF Technical Committee, and a sibling Technical Committee was formed in March 1989, called the CDIF Technical Committee. This group has carried on the standards development.
CDIF ARCHITECTURE
This section describes the underlying architecture of the CDIF standards, describing the separate components of the architecture and how they fit together to provide the complete interchange definition.