Semi E97

SEMI E97 defines the CIM Framework Global Declarations and Abstract Interfaces, the shared vocabulary of common data types and interface declarations that SEMI E96's technical architecture patterns are expressed in — the actual type definitions, abstract interface signatures, and naming conventions that every domain implementation references, so two CIM components don't each invent their own incompatible notion of something as basic as a timestamp, an identifier, or a status code. Where E96 says "domains should expose interfaces in this general style," E97 is the concrete dictionary of exactly which abstract types and interface declarations exist to build those interfaces from — without it, E96's architectural guidance would still leave every implementer free to define their own version of a basic shared concept, reintroducing the same incompatibility problem at a lower level.

The failure mode E97 is built to prevent is subtle because it hides behind apparent compliance — two domain implementations can both correctly follow SEMI E96's architectural guidance, use sensibly-named interfaces, and still fail to interoperate if one represents a timestamp as a Unix epoch integer and the other as an ISO-8601 string, since E96 never specified which to use and left that choice to each implementer. E97 closes exactly that gap by making the basic building-block types and interface signatures a single shared, referenced declaration rather than each domain's own ad-hoc choice, which is why E97 is described as "global" — its declarations apply across every domain the CIM Framework covers, not scoped to any one of them.

SEMI E97 completes the three-layer CIM Framework stack together with SEMI E81 (which domains exist and what their boundaries are) and SEMI E96 (what architectural style their software should follow) — E97's global declarations are the concrete, shared building blocks that make E96's architectural patterns actually implementable the same way across every domain E81 defines.