Viewpoint consistency in ODP, a general interpretation

Multiple viewpoints are used in Open Distributed Processing (ODP) in order to decompose the complexity inherent in specifying distributed systems. Multiple viewpoints prompt the issue of consistency between viewpoints. The ODP reference model alludes to three different interpretations of consistency. We show that our interpretation, firstly, satisfies all the basic requirements of a definition of consistency and, secondly, can be specialised to any of the three ODP reference model definitions. The generality of our definition will be illustrated through instantiation in the FDT LOTOS