[eman] SCTE and EMAN: requesting a presentation slot.

[Benoit Claise <[e-mail]>]

Dear all,

I had a call with SCTE yesterday.
Frank, in the copy list, sent me this SCTE description, and could add 
some more information if needed:

    The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) is
    addressing energy management topics for the cable industry through
    its Smart Energy Management Initiative (SEMI). There are several
    sub-committees and working groups within SEMI, one of which is
    addressing energy measurement and management communications
    protocols. The scope of this group is to describe a logical
    Information Model that articulates the entities, attributes, and
    relationships supported by a wide variety of devices used within the
    cable environment, define a number of encoding and transport
    protocols that may be used to support the model, and provide a
    mapping between a specific protocol definition and the Information
    Model. There is a lot of overlap between this activity and the work
    of the IETF EMAN group. It is the hope of the SCTE working group to
    leverage the work occurring within the IETF to the greatest degree
    practical. Specifically, we hope to adopt the Information Model
    defined within the IETF. Members of the working group plan to
    participate in the IETF  to further refine the information model. 

We discussed the EMAN and SCTE scopes and agreed that the two groups 
want to solve the same problem (as described by 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-eman-requirements-12).
The IETF EMAN charter mentions MIB modules (data model), but we all 
understand that what is key is the information model definition (see RFC 
3444), and that future data models could exist in the future (NETCONF, 
IPFIX, you name it).
And the EMAN framework contains precisely an information model, which is 
used as input for the MIB module specifications. See 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-eman-framework-07#section-5

Brian, also in the copy list, reverse-engineering our MIB modules to 
create an UML based information model.
SCTE was not aware of the information model definition in the EMAN 
framework. To tell the truth, it's true that it is a little hidden in 
the series of EMAN documents.

It will be very valuable for EMAN to see Brian 's UML based information 
model, to understand if the object semantics are correctly defined, the 
information model shortcomings, and finally if we lack objects or use 
the wrong ones.

The good news is that Brian will be attending the IETF.
Nevil, Bruce, can you please organize a slot for Brian to present.
Based on the discussion I had with the SCTE group, that discussion will 
be very valuable.

Regards, Benoit