l appli- cations, then applications that need to exchange information relating to customer name will be able to interoperate without using an adapter. The SID model was developed by TeleManagement Forum and the CIM was developed by Distributed Management Task Force. These models are widely adopted in current industry. While SID is mainly for telecom solutions, CIM is mostly used in enterprise solutions. With convergence, there was a need for a com- mon model in telecom and enterprise industry. This led to the development of standards to map SID and CIM as a joint venture of TMF and DMTF. GB932 and GB933 from TMF and DSP2004 and DSP2009 are some of the documents that detail the alignment between the models. This chapter explains the fundamentals of SID and CIM SO that the reader can understand how an information model can be used in developing appli- cations that are compliant to information standards. The common terminol- logies used in the standard documents on information models is discussed in this chapter so that the reader can easily interpret information while reading a SID or CIM document for developing a specific application. The choice of what information model needs to be used in developing an application is driven by business requirements. SID is a part of the NGOSS framework. Hence some of the terminologies and concepts of SID can be found to have similarities with the eTOM business. This is intentional as TMF wanted to have a mapping of business processes to information models and applications developed using the information model. 24.2 Shared Information/Data Model (SID) The SID is a data centric framework similar to eTOM, which is a process centric framework of TMF. The SID information model represents business concepts, and the characteristics and relationships exhibited by the business concepts in an imple- mentation independent manner. The cases and contracts of NGOSS can be created using SID. The SID provides the reference models and common information/data catalogs that support eTOM business p