As you hopefully know by now, CMIS 1.0 was released for public comment thru December 22nd, and the excitement is building in the community and the press.  If you haven’t looked at it, and want to provide feedback on the CMIS standard, the time is now.

For more information on what CMIS can do for you, here are some useful references, including three of my posts on the topic (newest first):

• Three Fundamental CMIS Use Cases: A slide-show introduction to CMIS and the types of business problems it is trying to solve.
• CMIS, Beauty is More Than Skin Deep: Addressing how CMIS is more than just what you see in the spec.  With some creativity, CMIS can address more use cases than the creators set out to do in version 1.0.
• Vendor Support for CMIS: Here I talk about the importance of vendor support for the standard.  So far, so good.
• The Gilbane Group, with the support of OASIS and several ECM vendors, has produced a Beacon report that is freely available from their website after you register.  It is a pretty solid write-up of what CMIS is and what problems it solves.
• Advanced CMIS: Written by Florent Guillaume of Nuxeo, this write-up covers many of the concepts supported by CMIS beyond your Basic Content Services.
• Three Reasons to list CMIS in your Document Management RFP: The folks over at CMS Watch, specifically Alan Pelz-Sharpe, provide some insight as to why you should care about CMIS now, even if you are just getting started.  Nice to see them agree with my assertions from March.

I’ve been looking at CMIS 1.0 from a functional perspective, along with some others in the community.  If I want to solve business problem X using a CMIS-based application, what do I need?  What would make things easier?  Using my experience from building the AIIM iECM demo and many discussions with others in the industry, I’ve come up with a few things that I’d like to see CMIS support in 2.0.

Note the assumed nature of the next version of the spec.  If there isn’t another version coming, then what is the point?

Advanced Metadata Support

There are a few gaps in the metadata model support.  This realization came about while trying to solve some business problems with CMIS with some others in the ECM space.  We were looking at how well CMIS might support the modeling of different knowledge domains.  We were also trying to think of some of the folksonomy tagging approaches in the world of Enterprise/Web 2.0.

Two areas for enhancement were readily identified:

• Hierarchical Metadata: This is roughly defined where the value of one metadata field drives the value of another metadata field(s).  I personally dealt with this most often in the legal industry with the Client/Matter fields.  To support this now, you have to set and save the parent field and then run the lookup on the child field.
• Tagging: Right now, CMIS does not support tagging.  You can have a repeating field, but it is assigned per object and doesn’t handle different people wanting to apply different sets of tags.  If I tag it one way and Sarah tags it another way, the resulting collection of tags should be aggregated and displayed as a small tag cloud.  The underlying ECM system would determine the weights for each value (Authority, number of tags…), but CMIS needs to support individual tagging and the retrieval of tags that includes weighting and the set of tags the current user has set.  This support would need to include strong querying capabilities.

Okay, we have some areas for improvement, but now we need to look at the gaps in managing these domain models.

Managing Metadata Models

One thing I learned from the AIIM demo was the need to be able to define and query a logical domain model that was distinct from the implemented physical model on the repository side.  There is some initial support there with the localName representing the repository’s name for a field and the queryName representing the logical name, but no way to collectively manage them.

The issue is that while there is some support for a localNamespace, but no corresponding queryNamespace.  I cannot create and plug-in a custom domain model.

Let’s think about this for a second.  Let’s take the AIIM demo domain model, AIIMContent.  Let’s say I more thoroughly defined it and published it, creating some URI.  Vendors, or integrators, should be able to create a back-end implementation for the model for any desired vendor.

Then, using CMIS, I could query to see if the AIIMContent domain model is supported by the current repository.  If it is, then I can create that supported object type(s) and query the objects using the universal names (queryName) of the metadata attributes without know any of the implementation details in the underlying repository.

This feature is not there.  When the AIIM demo was created, I had to map, in my code, each attribute name.  All three vendors implemented the model with different naming conventions within their repository.  This support for common domain models would solve that problem and allow the developers of Content Applications to do that much less grunt work in their code.

Oh, and the support for an “Aspect” type of domain model does not exist either, but I consider that a 3.0 request.

Supporting Semantic Models Through Relationships

One advance feature that Florent didn’t discuss in detail was the concept of Relationships.  This is basically relating two content objects to each other with a defined relationship.

Here is where the need for relationships hits the modeling world, Semantic Modeling.  Looking at the different scenarios, you can actually create and navigate a nice semantic model using relationships.  The only point of failure is the lack of query support.

That’s right. I can create all the relationships in the world, but I can’t include them in a query. I can create a concept as a content-less object and create a relationship from content to that concept, but I can’t create a solid way to retrieve that information without browsing.

Problem.

Is That All?

I haven’t even touched on Transactions or Identity Management. Those are whole other balls of wax.  Look around and throw business solutions out there and figure out how to implement it using only CMIS as in interface. Come up with your gaps.

Keep thinking on it. CMIS 1.0 is an important first step, but we need to make sure that 2.0 continues the progress by solving a broader set of problems.