Subject: [Cbor] Considerations for converting from other serializations formats like Protocol Buffers and FlatBuffers

From: David Kemp <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2020 20:34:35 -0400

Jonathan,

RFC 8477 describes interoperability across various standards, and observes
that while great progress has been made standardizing network protocols,

"At the application layer and at the level of solution frameworks,
 interoperability is not yet mature.  Particularly, the work on data
 formats (in the form of data models and information models) has not
 seen the same level of consistency throughout SDOs.

 One common problem is the lack of an encoding-independent
 standardization of the information, the so-called information model."

In 8477 terminology converting between data models is called "schema
bridging", and the RFC describes both point-to-point and hub-and-spoke
translation. I believe languages like Thrift and Protobuf can map fairly
directly to an encoding-independent information model, which can then be
used as the hub of an application data bridge.

I'd like to see an example schema for your use case, to see how feasible it
is to do lossless bidirectional conversion between it and a bridge's
information
model
<https://github.com/oasis-tcs/openc2-jadn/blob/working/jadn-v1.0-wd01.md>.

Regards,
Dave

---

From: Jonathan Beri <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 08:45:16 -0700

Thanks David - RFC8477 has many good observations and JADN looks promising!

One use case is distributing machine learning models to devices. The
popular Tensorflow project has a resource-optimized version called
Tensorflow Lite <https://www.tensorflow.org/lite>, which creates models
using the aforementioned FlatBuffers format
<https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/guide/get_started#2_convert_the_model_format>.
Naive implementations might send a model following this schema
<https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflow/lite/schema/schema.fbs>.
More advanced use cases might send compiled C/C++ for maximum efficiency,
but that's beyond this discussion.

On Fri, Apr 10, 2020 at 5:34 PM David Kemp <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I'd like to see an example schema for your use case, to see how feasible
> it is to do lossless bidirectional conversion between it and a bridge's information
> model

-- 
Jonathan Beri
linkedin.com/in/jonathanberi <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanberi/>