ABSTRACT
The topic I address in this book already has many acronyms: CMIP, SNMP, ASN.1, NMS, EMS, OSS, OSF, TMN, OSI, MIB, FCAPS, GDMO, and SAP. Before I add CIM, WBEM, CIM-XML, xmlCIM, UML, mof, NPI, CMPI, SBLIM and other ingredients to the alphabet soup, I would like us to agree on the topic we are addressing and some basic, simple vocabulary to describe it.
