The IS0 Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) consists of four parts: an Overview of the reference model, the Descriptive Model, the Prescriptive Model, and the Architectural Semantics. The four parts provide the concepts and rules of distributed processing to ensure openness between interacting distributed application components. Openness is a combination of characteristics: i.e. scalability, accessibility, heterogeneity, autonomy and distribution. The RM-ODP introduces the

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... ncept of viewpoint to describe a system from a particular set of concerns, and hence to deal with the complexity of distributed systems. While all the viewpoints are relevant to the description and design of distributed systems, the computational and engineering models are the ones that bear most directly on the design and implementation of distributed systems. From a distributed software engineering point of view, the computational and engineering viewpoints are again the most important; they reflect the software structure of the distributed application most closely. In this introductory paper, we concentrate on the computational and engineering viewpoints.