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IDEF is short for ICAM DEFinition language. ICAM was an initiative managed by the US Air Force out of Wright Patterson AFB , Materials Laboratory and was part of their Technology Modernization efforts, specifically the Computers in Manufacturing (CIM) initiative. ICAM is short for Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing.
The specific projects that produced IDEF were the IISS projects (project priorities 6201, 6202 and 6203). IISS stands for "Integrated Information Support System" and was an effort to create an information processing environment that could be run in heterogeneous physical computing environments. The intent was to create 'generic subsystems' which could be used by a large number of companies ( contractors to the Air Force, and other armed forces).
There were various, exclusive, and different methods for storing computer data ( Sequential ( VSAM), Hierarchical ( IMS), NetworkDatabase Management Systems Model Type: Hierarchical model Network model Relational model A network model database management system has a more flexible structure than the hierarchical model or relational model, but pays for it in processing time and spec such as Cincoms TOTAL and CODASYLCODASYL is an acronym for COnference on DAta SYstems Languages . This was a volunteer organization formed in 1959 to guide the development of a standard programming language that could be used on many computers. This effort led to the development of COBOL databases such as IDMS created by Culinet. RelationalA Relational Database Management System (RDBMS is a database management system (DBMS) that is based on the relational model as introduced by Edgar F. History of the term Codd introduced the term in his seminal paper A Relational Model of Data for Large Sh had not, yet, become accepted in the general IT community as DB2IBM's DB2 product is a database management system. It has a long history and was what some consider to be the first database product to use SQL. According to Michael Stonebraker, when IBM chose to make SQL the standard for database query languages by anno had not been released by IBMThis article is about the International Business Machines Corporation; see IBM (disambiguation) for other uses of this abbreviation. International Business Machines Corporation IBM or colloquially, Big Blue (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since.
The ICAM project office deemed it valuable to create a "neutral" way of describing implemented physical data structuresbinary tree, a simple type of branching linked data structure. In computer science, a data structure is a way of storing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently. Often a carefully chosen data structure will allow a more efficient algorithm t so that a way could be found to process data independently of the way it was physically stored. Thus the IDEF1 language was created to allow a neutral description of existing physical data structures that could be equally applied regardless of the storage method (regardless of the DBMS, or file access method).
IDEF1 was the result of the IISS-6201 project, and was further extended into IDEF1X by the IISS-6202 project.
The sub-contractor making the most contribution to the content of IDEF1 (and IDEF1X) was DACOM, the Dan Appleton Company. Principle contractors included BoeingThe Boeing Company ( NYSE:BA) is a leading American aircraft and aerospace manufacturer, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, with its largest production facilities near Seattle, Washington. It is also a defense contractor. It is listed on the New York Sto and McDonnell_Douglas Corporations.
The most beneficial value of the IDEF1 data modeling technique was its ability to represent data structures independent of how they are to be stored. So, even though IDEF1 started its existence as a way to model physical data structures in a neutral way, it quickly became adopted by data modelers and data analysts as a way to represent data structures during requirements gathering sessions. This allowed the decision of which DBMS to use after the nature of the data structures to be implemented was known, with the potential benefit of reducing the "misfit" of data structure requirements to the capabilities, and limitations, of the DBMS.
As IDEF was produced by government funds, the technique is in the public domain. Therefore the earliest CASE tools utilized IDEF1X as its representation technique for data modeling. (If you click on the link for CASE you will see a picture of ERwin, which is showing a data model using the IDEF1X notation.)
The IISS projects actually produced working prototypes of an information processing environment that would run in heterogeneous computing environments. Current advancements in such techniques as Java and ODBC are now achieving the goals of ubiquity and versatility across computing environments that was first demonstrated by IISS.