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ODP adopts the object modelling approach to system specification. ISO/IEC 10746-2 [ Bibliography#ref55] includes the formal definitions of the concepts and terminology adopted from object models, which serves as the foundation for expressing the architecture of ODP systems. The modelling concepts fall into three categories [ Bibliography#ref44, Bibliography#ref5 5]:
- Basic modelling concepts for a general object-based model;
- Specification concepts to allow designers to describe and reason about ODP system specifications;
- Structuring concepts, including organisation, the properties of systems and objects, management, that correspond to notions and structures that are generally applicable in the design and description of distributed systems.
ODP is best known for its use of viewpoints. A viewpoint (on a system) is an abstraction that yields a specification of the whole system related to a particular set of concerns. The ODP reference model defines five specific viewpoints as follows [ Bibliography#ref44, Bibliography#ref6 6]:
- The Enterprise Viewpoint, which concerns the organisational situation in which business (research activity in the current case) is to take place; For better communication with ENVRI community, in this document, we rename it as Science Viewpoint.
- The Information Viewpoint, which concerns modelling of the shared information manipulated within the system of interest;
- The Computational Viewpoint, which concerns the design of the analytical, modelling and simulation processes and applications provided by the system;
- The Engineering Viewpoint, which tackles the problems of diversity in infrastructure provision; it gives the prescriptions for supporting the necessary abstract computational interactions in a range of different concrete situations;
- The Technology Viewpoint, which concerns real-world constraints (such as restrictions on the facilities and technologies available to implement the system) applied to the existing computing platforms on which the computational processes must execute.
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The ODP standard is used as the modelling and specification framework, which enables the designers from different organisations to work independently and collaboratively. The development starts from a core model and will be incrementally extended based on the community common requirements and interests. The reference model will be evaluated by examining the feasibilities in implementations, and the refinement of the model will be based on community feedback.
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