A Type Management System for Open Distributed Processing

A goal of Open Distributed Processing (ODP) is to allow the interconnection of existing heterogeneous systems and to support the introduction of new services at run-time (to allow for system evolution). One of the greatest problems in achieving this goal is managing the heterogeneity of the environment. The Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) introduces a Type Repository function as a support for overcoming this problem by providing a framework for describing and relating the types of information, services and entities in an open distributed system. This report presents a brief overview of type description and type management in RM-ODP, and focuses on the development of a type model and strategies for type management for use in an open distributed environment. It considers related approaches in object-oriented databases, persistent programming, and distributed system architectures, and evaluates them with respect to the requirements of ODP. It further considers issu..