New OMG Specification Work to Integrate Robotics Systems; Tailor UML for Real-time and Embedded Computing.

NEEDHAM, Mass. -- New CORBA, Life Sciences Specifications Start Final Votes as Members Meet in Burlingame, California, January 31-February 4, 2005

Members of the Object Management Group(TM) (OMG(TM)) chartered the Robotics Domain Special Interest Group during the organization's Technical Meeting two weeks ago in Burlingame, CA, sponsored by Boeing (www.boeing.com). At the end of a day full of presentations and demonstrations of robotics technology, which included iRobot's PackBot(TM) moving up and down the aisles, major industry vendors from the United States and Japan passed a motion creating the new group.

UML(R) Profile Brings MDA to Real-time, Embedded Computing

OMG members issued Requests for Proposals (RFPs) defining requirements and deadlines for three new standards. One will standardize a Unified Modeling Language(TM) (UML) Profile tailoring the modeling language for Real-time, Embedded, and Specialized Systems Computing. This will bring the full benefits of OMG's Model Driven Architecture(R) (MDA(R)) to this growing field. Another will standardize Anonymous Networking, not only allowing the sender of a network invocation to conceal his identity from the receiver, but also concealing the origination point and endpoint from network eavesdroppers who otherwise may be able to determine this by examining packets for routing information, or analyzing network traffic. This anonymization capability is required, primarily for security reasons, by many industries including healthcare and homeland defense, and for compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley act. Finally, the third RFP will define an Abstract Syntax Tree Metamodel that allows computer code in any language to be represented in a single standard form.

Any interested company may join OMG and submit in response to these RFPs. For additional information including deadlines, see www.omg.org or send an email to [e-mail].

Boeing Presentation

Carl G. O'Berry, Boeing Vice President of Network Centric Architectures, Integrated Defense Systems, spoke to a plenary session on "The Future of Network Centric Operations".

Specifications Pass Final Adoption Votes

Following votes by all OMG members, a vote of the Board of Directors makes a new specification official. Immediately after the meeting, the Board ratified new specifications adding reflection capability to CORBA(R) invocations; defining a Single Nucleotide Polymorphism handling facility, and finalizing the 2.0 release of UML. The definitive versions of these specifications are now available from OMG's website at www.omg.org/specifications.

Tutorials, Information Days, and Software Demonstrations

During the meeting week, OMG members and staff presented four half-day tutorials on the group's various specifications. An information day focused on upcoming standards work in Knowledge-Based Engineering, a foundation technology for large-scale industrial activity, and the Healthcare Domain Task Force (DTF) progressed cooperative work with domain standards group HL7. Member companies demonstrated software products implementing OMG specifications in a busy area shared with the co-located OSDL Enterprise Linux Summit.

The Liaison Subcommittee announced that UML 1.4 had been adopted by ISO as international standard ISO/IEC 19501 (2005).

Next Meeting; Links to Additional Information

OMG members will meet next in Athens, Greece, during the week of April 11-15, 2005, co-sponsored by Kennedy-Carter (www.kc.com) and Mentor Graphics (www.mentor.com/). Interested non-members may attend as observers; for an invitation, see http://www.omg.org/tcguest. Members may register for the meeting at www.omg.org/registration. Further information may be found at http://www.omg.org/Athens. OMG's home page is www.omg.org. Information about the MDA is collected at 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 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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