Call for Participation: OMG Regulatory Compliance Alliance (ORCA(TM)) Developing Open Global Regulatory Information Database (GRID); Open database project to provide comprehensive compliance reference guide to global IT managers.

NEEDHAM, Mass. -- The Object Management Group(TM) (OMG(TM)) and the OMG Regulatory Compliance Alliance (ORCA(TM)) today issued a call for participation for a unique open database project focused on global regulations called the Global Regulatory Information Database (Compliance GRID(TM)). OMG and ORCA invite any person or organization with knowledge of a compliance rule/regulation to submit their information for inclusion in the database. Contributors should fill out the form available at: http://orca.omg.org/pr.

The Compliance GRID is an open project, managed by the OMG, which will consist of contributed IP and cover more than 20 different data points for each regulation. A team of regulatory compliance experts will vet all submissions. Contributors will be acknowledged in the Compliance GRID and will be invited to attend a networking dinner reception during OMG's Technical Meeting in June 2006 to be held in Boston, Mass.

The Compliance GRID is being developed to help compliance officers, IT managers and others involved in regulatory compliance to identify the relevant laws for their geographic operating markets - and to deal with inconsistencies and conflicts. Once the database is populated, any individual or company will be able search the Compliance GRID free-of-charge after registering.

"We will be developing the Compliance GRID in much the same fashion as the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, which continues to gather definitions and usage of words from a global team of volunteers," said Adrian Bowles, Program Director, Regulatory Compliance at OMG. "For firms with significant IT compliance requirements, collaborating with peer organizations via ORCA to develop a world class resource is far less expensive and time consuming than attempting to monitor and manage this information alone. The Compliance GRID project will benefit all companies facing regulatory compliance issues."

In addition to seeking submissions of compliance rules/regulations, ORCA is also seeking contributions to the profiles it is developing on the regulatory climate in its initial country targets. More information on the individual country regulatory climate profiles can be found at: http://orca.omg.org/grid/profiles.htm

Compliance GRID Features

ORCA's Global Regulatory Information Database (GRID) is being developed as an open database of rules, regulations, standards, and government guidance documents that require IT action, and a survey of the regulatory climate around the world. The goal of this project is to provide the de facto compliance reference guide for global IT managers. The Compliance GRID will be searchable by vertical market and geography, so a user will be able to determine which rules apply to their firm based on those attributes.

For more information on the OMG Regulatory Compliance Alliance or the ORCA Compliance GRID, please contact Nicole Rikkinen at [e-mail]. For information about joining OMG, please visit www.omg.org or contact OMG's Director of Business Development, Ken Berk at [phone] or [e-mail].

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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