HP WBEM Services Software Developer's Kit for HP-UX Provider and Client Developer's Guide A.01

Introduction to WBEM, CIM, CIM Server, and Providers
A Common Model of Systems and Devices
Chapter 1 15
all of the properties of its parent, or superclass, and possibly other
properties of its own. All of its properties would in turn be inherited by
any subclasses.
Inheritance offers an important benefit for client applications, since a
client need not be developed to explicitly know about platform-specific
features. For example, a client developed to manage user accounts could
manipulate instances of a generic account object (CIM_Account), even
though user accounts on different operating systems would typically be
represented with additional, different properties. The platform-specific,
fully represented account object would be defined as a subclass of
CIM_Account (or one of its subclasses), but a request for all instances of
CIM_Account would return the instances of subclasses, as well.
The model also describes associations between different objects.
Associations are defined as classes, and therefore may also have
properties and methods, and may make use of inheritance. An example
of an association is the CIM_ControlledBy class, which allows a device to
be associated with a device controller. In addition to pointers to the
device and its associated controller, the definition for this class contains
other information that is specific to the association itself, such as the
selected data rate.
A hierarchy of object (or class) definitions resides in a namespace. A
namespace can be thought of as a kind of directory or folder; namespaces
themselves are organized hierarchically. HP WBEM Services for HP-UX
is installed with the DMTF's CIM V2.5 class definitions preloaded in the
root/cimv2 namespace. Other namespaces can exist on the same
system, and can be used to manage separate sets of objects. The uses of
namespaces and namespace security are described in more detail in the
Appendix A: CIM Naming Guidelines and in the Security Architecture
section of Chapter 4.