Meta Data Services Programming
Extending vs. Creating Information Models
You can create a new information model or extend an existing one. In general, each information model should accommodate the data about a particular area of your application environment.
When faced with the decision of whether to extend an existing information model or build a new one, you can follow these guidelines to determine a course of action.
- To accommodate data or structures that are unrelated or only minimally related to existing type information, create a new information model.
- To accommodate additional kinds of data that are closely related to existing type information model, extend an existing information model.
After you decide that extending an information model is the right choice, you must decide whether to extend it through a modeling tool or through the repository API. If you do not own a modeling tool or if the change is small, you can use the repository API to create type information programmatically.