CSA Preface
Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the IS0 member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Cons u I tat ive Committee (ITU-T).
This International Standard was reviewed by the CSA TClT under the jurisdiction of the Strategic Steering Committee on Information Technology and deemed acceptable for use in Canada. (A committee membership list is available on request from the CSA Project Manager.) From time to time, ISO/IEC may publish addenda, corrigenda, etc. The CSA TClT will review these documents for approval and publication. For a listing, refer to the CSA Information Products catalogue or CSA Info Update or contact a CSA Sales representative. This Standard has been formally approved, without modification, by these Committees and has been approved as a National Standard of Canada by the Standards Council of Canada.
Scope
This part of ISO/IEC 13719 specifies PCTE in abstract, programming-language-independent, terms. It specifies the interface supported by any conforming implementation as a set of abstract operation specifications, together with the types of their parameters and results. It is supported by a number of standard bindings, i.e. representations of the interface in standard programming languages.
The scope of this part of ISO/IEC 13719 is restricted to a single PCTE installation. It does not specify the means of communication between PCTE installations, nor between a PCTE installation and another system.
A number of features are not completely defined in this part of ISO/IEC 13719, some freedom being allowed to the implementor. Some of these are implementation limits, for which constraints are defined (see clause 24). The other implementation-dependent and implementation-defined features are specified in the appropriate places in this Standard.
PCTE is an interface to a set of facilities that forms the basis for constructing environments supporting systems engineering projects. These facilities are designed particularly to provide an infrastructure for programs which may be part of such environments. Such programs, which are used as aids to systems development, are often referred to as tools.
This part of ISO/IEC 13719 also includes (in annex B) a language standard for the PCTE Data Description Language (DDL), suitable for writing PCTE schema definition sets.
