Subject: [sacm] [draft-ietf-sacm-terminology] Capability and Function (#8)

From: henkbirkholz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2015 08:28:44 -0700

Outside of SACM, a function is often understood as “the purpose or activity for which something exists or is used for”. Correspondingly, a capability is the “existing potential for an active function”, meaning that something might be potentially capable of the function, but maybe not at a given moment (e.g. a deactivated feature, or during a specific process step).

Would it be possible to merge these two terms? There are valid reasons why they are separate concepts at the moment (mainly, Functions is being used to describe qualities, such as Authentication or Discovery, of other Management Plane Capabilities), but merging them would reduce the complexity of concepts. The resulting (merged) definition could be the Building Blocks that SACM Components are composed of (please also see Issue “Composition Concept”).

For example, the resulting Building Blocks could be distinguished in Management Plane Building Blocks (therefore providing, e.g.  Authentication or Discovery, or controlling the Data Plane Building Blocks) and Data Plane Building Blocks that produce or consume the payload processed by SACM (e.g. via (task-)specific Interfaces). 

For comparison, these are the current definitions (citation with fixed typos):

“Capability: The extent of an architectural component's ability.  For example, a Posture Information Provider may only provide endpoint management data, and then only a subset of that data.”

“Function:  A behavioral aspect of a particular architectural component, which belies that component's purpose.  For example, the Management Plane can provide a brokering function to other SACM architectural components.”

This might be perceived as a disruptive comment, as it took a long time for these terms to be chosen. I would be very interested in getting comments on this from the whole group specifically regarding these two terms and the implication to “Composition of SACM Components from Building Blocks”.

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https://github.com/sacmwg/draft-ietf-sacm-terminology/issues/8