On the effective use of software standards in systems integration

A set of standards for an open systems environment is presented, and an approach to the use of these standards in systems integration is defined. In particular, the approach helps to deal with three aspects of software standards that affect systems integration: periodic revision, missing features that result in the use of proprietary system services, and imprecise, natural language specification. The architectural approach is consistent with the toolkit model of systems development that has been popularized by window systems, and takes advantage of the features provided by many window systems for building user-defined components.<>