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Appendix: Enabling Technology
Early in the Process Handbook project, we realized that the power of a repository like the Process Handbook would be significantly increased if it were possible to easily and automatically transfer information between the repository and other software applications. In order to do this, however, some common format for exchanging information is needed.
With this goal in mind, we created a working group, including people from a number of other universities and companies, to define such a common format. This appendix describes the results of that group's work. The format defined by the working group is called the Process Interchange Format (PIF) (see ccs.mit.edu/pif ). This format defines common terminology and representational conventions for many of the concepts that are needed whenever representations of processes are exchanged.One of the virtues of the approach taken here is that it also exploits the notion of specialization of processes (see chapter 1) to simplify the creation of specialized extensions to the format. These specialized extensions can be shared by subsets of people to communicate detailed information, but the basic ''meaning''of the extensions is still interpretable by other users who understand only the basic format.The work described in this appendix is now being incorporated by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) into the definition of their Process Specification Language (PSL) (see http://ats.nist.gov/psl/).
