A Metamodel for Composing Dynamic Systems
In the emerging digital world, billions of people, systems, and devices will interact and react in real-time, requiring new and disruptive approaches to distributed data/state management, interoperability, and rule-based event processing.
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A key challenge to digital transformation is the ability to enable end-to-end interoperability across different industries, each having its own environments and interdependent use cases. Interoperability allows disparate information systems from multiple vendors to readily work together and exchange data. It enables valuable business connections, whether across processes, between people and information, or among companies in a value chain. Providing interoperability helps customers decrease complexity and better manage heterogeneous environments—while enhancing choice and innovation in the market.
A McKinsey report estimates that achieving interoperability in IoT would unlock an additional 40 percent value in the total available market.
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The SoS Metamodel implements an ontology-based event-driven architecture that provides a degree of abstraction and trust necessary for highly distributed, semantically interoperable systems. This architecture can break down data silos, eliminate complex system integrations, and unify information spaces – in a way that is simple, scalable, and sustainable. It extends the capabilities and interoperability of service-based infrastructure (IaaS), application platforms (aPaaS), and software (SaaS).
COMMON SERVICES
The SoS metamodel comprises simple common services to manage event-defined objects within a system of interoperable systems. These systems can span the subsystems of IoT devices, businesses, humans, vehicles, and cities. To scale, these services must be stable, unchanging, transport-independent, and embeddable in any type of machine, from edge controllers to cloud servers.
COMMON ONTOLOGY
The SoS metamodel incorporates a top-level ontology (TLO) that includes information, system, and commerce models. This TLO provides a standardized classification of top-level, cross-domain concepts that support broad semantic interoperability among interdependent, domain-specific ontologies and use cases. Collectively, these concepts represent physical objects, information objects, and ontology objects themselves.
COMMON MESSAGE FORMATS
Events and query-results represent the majority of distributed data exchanged and are most efficiently contained within a grid (tabular) structure. BEAM (Bidirectional Entity Attribute Message) formats are structured as grids that support contextual events, queries/results, and views. The messages are transported in a syntactical format suitable for a specific transport protocol.
