...

AAI federates inventory using a central registry to create a global view of inventory and network topology. AAI receives updates from various inventory masters distributed throughout the OpenECOMP infrastructure, and persists just enough to maintain the global view. As transactions occur, AAI persists asset attributes and relationships into the federated view based on configurable metadata definitions for each activity that determine what is relevant to the AAI inventory. AAI provides standard APIs to enable queries from various clients regarding inventory and topology. Queries can be supported for a specific asset or a collection of assets. The AAI global view of relationships is necessary for forming aggregate views of detailed inventory across the distributed master data sources within D2. <<something must be substituted here for "D2" or this removed–see comment>>. 

Administration 

AAI also performs a number of administrative functions. Metadata models for the various assets are stored, updated, applied and versioned dynamically as needed without requiring a system shutdown for maintenance. Given the distributed nature of AAI as well as the relationships with other OpenECOMP components, audits are periodically run to assure that AAI is in sync with the inventory masters such as controllers and MSO. Adapters allow AAI to interoperate with non-D2 other systems as well as 3^rd party cloud providers via evolving cloud standards.  <<something must be substituted here for "D2" or this removed-see comment>> 

Reporting and notification

...