The NIST Application Portability Profile

A profile is a collection of specifications developed to meet a set of requirements. Elements of a profile may consist of either formal standards, i.e., those developed within a voluntary standards organization such as ANSI or IEEE, or de facto standards, i.e., those accepted within the marketplace. Each element of a profile may be a specification in its entirety or a specification with certain options or parameters chosen.

The NIST Application Portability Profile (APP) [Fis93] was developed by NIST in order to meet the requirements of Federal Agencies for an OSE. A Federal Agency uses the NIST APP to develop profiles specific to its individual requirements. The NIST APP is organized into several service areas which reflect the breath of services needed by an OSE application. These service areas are:

1. Operating System Services: those services providing basic manipulation of a system's fundamental resources such as processes and files.
2. Human Computer Interface Services: those services providing for the interactions between the end user and the system such as window management and multimedia access.
3. Software Engineering Services: those services supporting the application programmer such as programming languages and software development tools.
4. Data Management Services: those services providing for the definition and manipulation of data such as schema definition and query languages.
5. Data Interchange Services: those services which provide common representations for the exchange of data between systems such as document formats and display representations.
6. Graphics Services: those services providing for the creation and manipulation of displayed multidimensional images.
7. Network Services: those services providing interoperability among systems such as communication protocols.

This document is organized according to APP service areas. Each part of this document corresponds to one of the service areas defined in the APP. Not all specifications in the APP are discussed in this document and some technologies not included in the APP are discussed in this document. The decision to include a discussion of the security aspects of a technology or specification in the document is based on the relevance of the technology within an OSE and on the presence of a significant security concern associated with the technology.