Jeroen wrote in the notes:
We had a short discussion on whether NSI descriptions and physical topology descriptions are different things. One is something like a service, the other is the actual instantiation of it. This is similar to identifiers for books, stories, translations and physical books. Freek remembers that libraries have a solution for identifiers on those things, he will try to get a link to that and post it.
My feeble attempt to translate library versioning concepts to IT: * work - Eg. "Gone with the Wind" or "Browne natural language corpus" * expression - Swedish translation of the work - software implementation * manifestation - hard cover of the expression - Excel sheet or XML file * item - actual book on a shelf - copy on a disk Anyway, in NML we currently have a "Lifetime" for each network element (it's in the diagram). I wonder if the aliases Jerry mentioned in his slides are a better way to handle versioning. (Assuming this is all different from topology aggregation.) Freek