APP Service Areas and the Open-System Environment

The Application Portability Profile (APP) is a 1990s framework for Open-System Environment designed by the

NIST The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...

for use by the U.S. Government. It contains a selected suite of specifications that defines the interfaces, services, protocols, and data formats for a particular class or domain of applications. The Application Portability Profile offers structure to "integrate US federal, national and international, and other specifications to provide the functionality necessary to accommodate the broad range of US federal information technology

requirement In product development and process optimization, a requirement is a singular documented physical or functional need that a particular design, product or process aims to satisfy. It is commonly used in a formal sense in engineering design, includi ...

s."The Open Group (2007) ''TOGAF 2007 Edition: (incorporating 8.1.1)''. p. 507

Overview

In the second half of the 20th century

information system An information system (IS) is a formal, sociotechnical, organizational system designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. From a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people ...

s initially developed from isolated islands of

computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...

. Through progressive changes, these individual systems became connected by common users and common information needs. Late 20th century these systems were well on the way to migrating toward computing environments that consist of distributed, heterogeneous, networked applications, databases, and hardware. The concept emerged of a federal computing environment, that is built on an infrastructure defined by open, consensus-based standards which serve as de facto means of organizing these systems. The NIST developed such an infrastructure, and named it

Open System Environment Open-system environment (OSE) reference model (RM) or ''OSE reference model'' (OSE/RM) is a 1990 reference model for enterprise architecture. It provides a framework for describing open system concepts and defining a lexicon of terms, that can ...

(OSE).Naval Information Systems Management Center (1994) ''Ada Implementation Guide : Software Engineering With Ada Volume I''. Department of the Navy, April 1994 An Open System Environment (OSE) encompasses the functionality needed to provide

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader defi ...

, portability, and

scalability Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that a company can increase sales given increased resources. For example, a ...

of computerized applications across

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

s of heterogeneous, multi-vendor hardware/software/communications platforms. The Open System Environment forms an extensible framework that allows services, interfaces, protocols, and supporting data formats to be defined in terms of nonproprietary specifications that evolve through open (public), consensus-based forums. Complementary to the Open System Environment is the Application Portability Profile standard. This standard can covers a broad range of application software domains of interest to many US federal agencies, but it does not include every domain within the U.S. Government's application inventory. The individual standards and specifications in the APP define data formats, interfaces, protocols, or a mix of these elements.

APP topics

APP and the NIST Enterprise Architecture Model

The "Application Portability Profile (APP) - The U.S. Government’s Open System Environment Profile Version 3.0" provides recommendations on a set of industry, Federal, national, international and other specifications that define interfaces, services, protocols, and data formats to support an

(OSE). The APP addresses the lowest architecture in the

NIST Enterprise Architecture Model NIST Enterprise Architecture Model (NIST EA Model) is a late-1980s reference model for enterprise architecture. It defines an enterprise architectureChief Information Officer Council (2001) A Practical Guide to Federal Enterprise Architecture ...

, i.e., the Delivery System Architecture. On this level the hardware of the

computer architecture In computer engineering, computer architecture is a description of the structure of a computer system made from component parts. It can sometimes be a high-level description that ignores details of the implementation. At a more detailed level, t ...

, the

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

and the communications are being specified. Based on these specification recommendations, various services and agencies have defined detailed technical reference models.

APP service areas

The services defined in the Application Portability Profile fall into the following broad spectrum of service areas:Joseph Hungate (1995)
Conference Report: Application Portability Profile and Open System Environment Users Forum Gaithersburg, MD May 9–10, 1995
in: ''Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology''. Volume 100, Number 6, November–December 1995 * Operating system services (OS) * Human/computer interface services (HCI) * Data management services (DM) * Data interchange services (DI) * Software engineering services (SWE) * Graphics services (GS) * Network services (NS) Each of the Application Portability Profile service areas addresses specific components around which interface, data format, or protocol specifications have been or will be defined. Security and management services are common to all of the service areas and pervade these areas in one or more forms.

Applications

In the 1990s the NIST's Application Portability Profile has been applicated in several Enterprise Information Architecture frameworks, such as:Federal Aviation Administration (1998) ''Federal Information Architecture Initiatives''. Federal Aviation Administration, Architecture and Systems Engineering Division, ASD-100, and NAS Information Architecture Team. February 1998 * Information Architecture framework for the

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alexa ...

(PTO) of the

Department of Commerce The United States Department of Commerce is an executive department of the U.S. federal government concerned with creating the conditions for economic growth and opportunity. Among its tasks are gathering economic and demographic data for bu ...

(DoC), and *

Department of Defense Department of Defence or Department of Defense may refer to: Current departments of defence * Department of Defence (Australia) * Department of National Defence (Canada) * Department of Defence (Ireland) * Department of National Defense (Philippin ...

(DoD) in its

Technical Architecture Framework for Information Management Technical may refer to: * Technical (vehicle), an improvised fighting vehicle * Technical analysis, a discipline for forecasting the future direction of prices through the study of past market data * Technical drawing, showing how something is co ...

(TAFIM) File:COE Achitecture.jpg, C4I Technical Architecture, COE Architecture, 1995 File:Detailed DoD Technical Reference Model.jpg, Detailed DoD Technical Reference Model, 1996

References