Service Modeling Language Announced
Sun has announced its involvement with a new management specification called the Service Modeling Language (SML). Right now it is being worked through a feedback process before being submitted to a standards body such as the DMTF.
The initial draft specification (v 0.5) and the .xsd can be downloaded from the official web page.
The specification itself describes a set of constructs for modeling complex IT services and their inter-relationships and dependencies. These are expressed as constraints captured in Schemas (strict subset of XML Schema) and Rules (Boolean expressions). The model is really just a set of inter-related documents describing the system or its desired state.
Besides profiling XML Schema version 1.0, it also profiles Schematron for use in validating the model. SML uses XPath 1.0 with some extensions as the constraint language. A good introduction to Schematron can be found here. What this new modeling language is really good at is to describe the desired state of the dependent services that need to be provisioned and activated in the environment. The constraints allow a service provider to add their own rules about "what works with what" and what configurations of various software versions are supported and tested.
This would be ideal for use in a Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB) where changes are propagated from the truth, stored as an instance of a database schema to the real world only after having been validated for correctness.
