Hello,
        
We have uploaded an Internet draft about data modeling for
network management. It can be found here:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-xiao-evaluate-dml-00.txt

We are Debao Xiao and Hui Xu. Debao Xiao is a professor at
Institute of Computer Network and Communication, HuaZhong
Normal University (www.ccnu.edu.cn) and Hui Xu is his doctor
candidate. Professor Xiao has many years of experience
in the area of network management and we are now working in
a research project (funded by both the key scientific and
technological project of Wuhan city in P. R. China and
the key scientific and technological project of Hubei province
in P.R. China) about next generation network management and
security management.

In some scenarios, the multiplicity of network management models
implies the use of multiple management data modeling languages,
which model the resources to be managed. Each language differs in
the level of various capabilities and expressiveness, most of
which are not easily measured. One of the activities in this project
has then been to address the problem about how to establish a
framework of evaluation to compare different management data modeling
languages based on a set of criteria.

Another aim of our project is to prospect the essentail features of
future data modeling language based on proposed framework of evaluation,
since existing ones have drawbacks of different levels, which hinder
them in adapting to the requirements of next generation network management.

We have demonstrated the most important part of our proposed criteria in
this draft, which are modeling approaches, expressiveness, readability,
interoperability, extensibility and others, and have also presented some
perspectives on developing future data modeling languages for next
generation network management, possibly integrating existing ones. The
characteristics of existing data modeling languages are then summarized
through comparison based on given criteria for evaluation.

We hope our work can contribute to any future work on
data modeling for next generation network management.

If there is significant interest, we would be happy to give
a presentation of this Internet draft in Wuhan, P. R. China.
       
Best regards,
Debao Xiao and Hui Xu