Open Standards: OIM, COM, XML

Open standards are publicly available specifications that describe the characteristics of a technology. The objective of open standards is to promote interoperability. For integration platforms like Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Meta Data Services, interoperability is essential. For this reason, you find open interfaces and specifications used wherever possible in Meta Data Services architecture.

Meta Data Services supports three open standards: the Meta Data Coalition (MDC) Open Information Model (OIM), Component Object Model (COM) interfaces, and Extensible Markup Language (XML) encoding. At each phase of an application life cycle, there is an open standard that you can use to lock in integration.

OIM for Design-Time Integration

OIM is a standard information model that can be shared, reused, and extended. It is published by the MDC and is widely supported in the tool vendor market. The wide support of OIM makes it possible to use the same information model design in a variety of implementation tools.

In Meta Data Services, you can use OIM as a framework on which to build type information. OIM is not required by the repository engine or the API. However, when you use OIM, you can take advantage of resources and features in the Meta Data Services Software Development Kit (SDK) that greatly simplify your development effort. Furthermore, you can use information models in any OIM-compliant tool.

COM Interfaces for Program-Level Integration

COM interfaces are binary specifications for building, using, and evolving component software. COM is supported in programming languages such as Microsoft Visual Basic®, Microsoft Visual C++®, and Microsoft Visual J++®. COM architecture and supporting infrastructure are developed and maintained by Microsoft.

When programming Meta Data Services, you can use COM interfaces defined in the repository API to access both the repository engine and your information model from your application code. Because the repository engine and information models are exposed as COM objects, the only thing that varies from one programming language to another is the COM-implementation strategy of your development platform.

XML for Run-Time and Storage-Level Integration

XML is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for the representation of information as structured documents. XML is used increasingly for data transport between heterogeneous systems.

The repository engine supports XML encoding to provide import and export of stored meta data in XML format. XML encoding enables the exchange of meta data between different OIM-compliant repositories.

See Also

Meta Data Services Architecture

OIM in Meta Data Services

Repository API

Using XML Encoding

XML in Meta Data Services