The DMTF is the industry organization leading the development, adoption, and unification of management standards and initiatives for desktop, enterprise, and Internet environments. For more information about DMTF, see the DMTF Web site.
The DMTF CIM is an approach to system and network management that applies the basic structuring and conceptualization techniques of the object-oriented paradigm. The approach uses a uniform modeling formalism that together with the basic repertoire of object-oriented constructs supports the cooperative development of an object-oriented schema across multiple organizations.
A management schema is provided to establish a common conceptual framework at the level of a fundamental topology, both with respect to classification and association, and to a basic set of classes intended to establish a common framework for a description of the managed environment. The management schema is divided into the following conceptual layers:
Core Model: An information model that captures notions that are applicable to all areas of management.
Common Model: An information model that captures notions that are common to particular management areas, but independent of a particular technology or implementation. The common areas are systems, applications, databases, networks, and devices. The information model is specific enough to provide a basis for the development of management applications. This model provides a set of base classes for extension into the area of technology-specific schema. The Core and Common models together are expressed as the CIM schema.
Extension Schema: This schema represents technology-specific extensions of the Common model. These schema are specific to environments, such as operating systems, for example, NetWare® or Microsoft Windows.
CIM comprises a specification and a schema (see the DMTF Web site. The specification defines the meta-schema plus a concrete representation language called Managed Object Format (MOF).