Major Advances in Key Standards Completed at OMG Meeting in Paris; UML 2.0 Superstructure adopted, Legacy Transformation Working Group Forms.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

NEEDHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 12, 2003

Members of the Object Management Group(TM) (OMG(TM)) gathered last week in Paris at a meeting sponsored by Compuware Corporation, THALES and Sun Microsystems. In a key development, the Analysis and Design Task Force voted to recommend adoption of the Unified Modeling Language(TM) (UML(TM)) 2.0 Superstructure specification, completing the definition of this major upgrade to the industry's main software modeling notation.

The Paris meeting also saw the formative meeting of the Legacy Transformation Working Group. Because there is a huge amount of useful, deployed, operational legacy software representing an enormous commercial investment, there's an urgent and constant need to understand and evolve existing software assets for the purpose of Improvement, Interoperability, Porting, Migrations and Documenting this software. The Legacy Transformation Working Group will work on standards to aid understanding and evolving existing software assets, including recovering models for use with Model Driven Architecture(R) (MDA(R)). The working group will meet next during OMG's UML(TM) Workshop in Burlingame, CA, USA, June 25 -26, 2003.

New Infrastructure Standards Adoptions

Task Forces also recommended a number of new distributed computing infrastructure specifications including a WSDL-SOAP to CORBA(R) inter-working framework and a mapping from CORBA's GIOP protocol to SCTP, a reliable transport protocol specified by IETF. The new Deployment and Configuration specification for the CORBA Component Model standardizes the mechanisms for deploying CORBA Components, and the UML Testing profile allows test procedures to be specified using UML.

New Standards Efforts Underway

Members of the Business Rules SIG will standardize a framework for representing the business semantics of Business Rules, while the Life Sciences Research Task Force began work on standards for representing and exchanging Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms and Compound Collections data. Other new work will standardize Quality of Service and Stream interfaces for CORBA Components. Any company may join OMG and submit a draft specification in response to the RFPs that set the requirements for these new standards; for more information see www.omg.org.

Meeting Sponsor Presentation and Other Activities

Meeting sponsors Compuware Corporation, Sun Microsystems and THALES gave presentations describing their use of OMG specifications. Dominique Potier, Group Scientific Director of Software Technologies for THALES Research and Technology, described his organization's use of OMG specifications, including MDA, CORBA, and the CORBA Component Model (CCM). Wim Bast Senior Software Architect for Compuware, talked about model transformations as part of the MDA approach, and Martin Matula, Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems, described the MDA tools that Sun delivers as part of its Netbeans product. A one-day seminar, CORBA in Action! included presentations by CORBA vendors--2AB, Prism Technologies and IONA--describing how CORBA products continue to provide valuable integration services to industry. Vendors from twelve companies demonstrated their implementations of OMG technologies.

Next Meeting

OMG members will meet next in Boston, MA, USA during the week of September 8-12, 2003. Interested non-members may attend as observers; for an invitation, see www.omg.org/news/meetings/tc/guest.htm.

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 standards cover multiple operating systems, programming languages, middleware and networking infrastructures, and software development environments. OMG's Modeling standards, the basis for the MDA, include the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM). CORBA, 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, with a U.S. government representative in Washington, DC, and international marketing representatives in Japan, the UK, and Germany, the Object Management Group is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry specifications consortium. OMG member companies write, adopt, and maintain the organization's standards following a mature, open process. All current OMG specifications may be downloaded without charge from the organization's website, www.omg.org; the site also provides additional information about OMG and its activities. For information on joining the OMG, or questions not addressed on the website, please contact OMG headquarters by email at [e-mail], by phone at [phone], or by fax at [phone].

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