By enabling links between interdependent components, users will be able to determine which set of standards and associated products interoperate to form a virtual Common Operating Environment. Partners in the effort include standards organizations, user groups, component suppliers, system integrators, and independent software validators. IDL provides mostly syntax, not semantics. It is also desirable to be able to look at individual differences among instances, and have dynamic discovery and introspection. MOF is useful, but the metamodel is not extensible, it supports only IDL, and no standard transfer format is defined.
Beans provides no access to fine-grained content, and metadata only on interfaces and methods.
XML allows arbitrary mixing of tagged information that represents both metadata and data. As a result, it is possible to start with a set of XML tags that represent a type, and then create instances by adding additional tags that hold the instance-specific data. The approach also provides an extensibility framework. Next steps for this technology include integration with RDF and XML-Link. This update will present the current status of that experiment.