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Basic Model Interface

The Basic Model Interface (BMI) is a standard interface for models. The interface is available in different languages and a language agnosting version in SIDL.

BMI was mainly developed to be used inside a programming language, or with direct language-to-language bindings. However, in some cases you want to communicate with a BMI where:

  • language-to-language bindings are complex or not viable (for example, R <-> Julia)
  • you want to insulate binary dependencies
  • two models don't run on the same version of a language (Python 2 vs. Python 3)
  • you want to containerize models

To have a consumer of the model and the provider of the model seperated you can use grpc4bmi, but this only works on languages that have a gRPC server and/or client implementation. The remotebmi project replaces the gRPC protocol with an REST API. The REST API specification is in the OpenAPI format.

Deviations from the standard BMI

Due to limitations in using a REST API, remotebmi has some minor differences:

  • Request body and response body are in JSON format
  • On errors you get 4xx and 5xx responses with Problem Details as response body
  • Variable names must be URL safe
  • Variable type must be in enum.
  • get_value_ptr function is not available