Business Modeling Specifications including Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) Advance at Object Management Group.

NEEDHAM, Mass. -- Two New Finance Specifications Also Start Adoption Process at OMG Meeting in Atlanta, GA, USA, September 12-16, 2005

Members of the Object Management Group(TM) (OMG(TM)), including many new members from the summer merger with the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), met in Atlanta, Georgia, USA during the week of September 12-16, 2005, sponsored by SAP (www.sap.com). During the meeting, members introduced BPMI's Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) into the OMG's fast-track adoption process, and members of the Finance Domain Task Force started work on two new specifications enhancing interoperability for network payments. In addition to standards work, members viewed demonstrations of products implementing OMG specifications, and attended information days, tutorials, and a co-located meeting of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems.

Business Modeling and Integration Activity

Renaming themselves the Business Modeling and Integration (BMI) Domain Task Force (DTF), members of OMG's former Business Enterprise Integration DTF and newly joined BPMI members unanimously elected former BPMI chairperson Jeanne Baker of Sterling Commerce as co-chair. Baker was also elected chair of OMG's new BPMI Steering Committee, a group of thought leaders in the business process management space responsible for spreading the word about BPM through educational website postings, conferences, and workshops.

BPMI's widely used standard for business modeling, BPMN, started the comment period required by OMG's fast-track "Request for Comment" (RFC) adoption process, as did the Business Motivation Model (BMM) contributed by the Business Rules Group. Any person or company may comment on these proposed specifications; see http://www.omg.org/rfc for details. Separately, a new standard defining the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SVBR) completed member evaluation and started the series of votes leading to formal adoption.

Finance Starts Work on Two New Specifications

OMG's Finance DTF issued the requirements documents, termed Requests for Proposals (RFPs), setting out the requirements and deadlines for two proposed new standards. One will define a set of Conversion Models for Payment Message Standards; the other, an XMI(R) Profile allowing ISO 20022 messages to be sent over the network in OMG XMI format.

Queries/Views/Transformations Specification Supports Model Manipulation

Models contribute maximum value to an enterprise when they can be transformed automatically through the forms required by the downstream development process as in, for example, OMG's Model Driven Architecture(R) (MDA(R)). Supporting this, a new standard representation of Model Queries, Views, and Transformations (QVT) has just completed member evaluation and started the series of votes leading to formal adoption.

New Specifications Start in Manufacturing, Defense, and Robotics

The Manufacturing Technology and Industrial Systems DTF issued an RFP for a new specification defining a set of Knowledge-Based Engineering (KBE) services for Product Lifecycle Management. Two more RFPs will standardize a UML(R) profile for DoDAF (the U.S. Department of Defense Architecture Framework) and MoDAF (the U.K. Ministry of Defense Architecture Framework), and a set of Robotic Technology Components that will form the foundation for a component-based software framework for the robotics industry.

Any company may join OMG and submit a draft specification for consideration by members in response to any RFP. For details and deadlines, download the RFP documents from http://www.omg.org/public_schedule.

Additional Specification Activity

A new specification for Chemical Structure Access and Representation, supporting Life Science Research, also started the final voting process. The final step in this process is a vote by OMG's Board of Directors (BoD). In Atlanta, a vote by the BoD gave MOF 2.0 Versioning the status of official OMG specification.

Meeting Sponsor Presentation

David Frankel, Lead Standards Architect for Model Driven Systems, SAP, keynoted the meeting with a presentation on "Model-Driven Business Process Platforms."

New Board of Directors Member

OMG's BoD elected Jan Popkin, Chief Strategist for Telelogic, to a three-year term.

Tutorials, Information Days, and Software Demonstrations

During the meeting week, OMG members and staff presented six half-day tutorials on the group's various specifications. The BMI DTF hosted an Information Day on Model-Based Management, and a daylong seminar covered IT Standards and Regulatory Compliance. Five member companies demonstrated software products implementing OMG specifications.

Next Meeting; Links to Additional Information

OMG members will meet next in Burlingame, California, USA, during the week of December 5-9, 2005. Interested non-members may attend as observers; for an invitation see http://www.omg.org/tcguest. Members may register for the meeting at http://www.omg.org/registration. OMG's home page is http://www.omg.org. Information about the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is collected at http://www.omg.org/mda. All OMG specifications may be downloaded free of charge from http://www.omg.org/specifications.

About The OMG

With well-established standards covering software from design and development, through deployment and maintenance, and extending to evolution to future platforms, the Object Management Group (OMG) supports a full-lifecycle approach to enterprise integration which maximizes ROI, the key to successful IT. OMG's Modeling standards, the basis for the MDA(R), include the Unified Modeling Language(TM) (UML(R)) and Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM(TM)). CORBA(R), the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is OMG's standard open platform with hundreds of millions of deployments running today. Headquartered in Needham, MA, USA, the Object Management Group is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry specifications consortium. More information about OMG can be found at www.omg.org.

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