OMG's Denver Meeting Drives Industry-Specific CORBA Standards; Members Vote In Favor of Data Warehousing Specification.

Business/Technology Editors

NEEDHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 20, 2000

The Object Management Group (OMG) recently concluded its latest Technical Meeting week in Denver, CO, USA, sponsored by Hewlett Packard Company. About 500 member representatives met to work on the approximately 100 technology adoptions currently in process across a wide range of industries including Life Sciences, Finance, Manufacturing, Utilities, and Healthcare. The five-day meetings provide a forum for the OMG members and their guests to carry out the standards-setting process that extend existing Object Management Architecture specifications including CORBA(R) and UML(TM).

New Standards Adoptions

Four new specifications started final adoption votes. First, a Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) for data warehousing will improve business decisions by facilitating access to timely data. To make best use of data warehousing, companies must integrate data from multiple warehouses across their enterprises, but inconsistencies in the data models from one warehouse to another make this difficult. Because these inconsistencies result from real differences in requirements from one business unit to another, it is not possible to standardize on a common data model for data warehousing. However, by defining a standard for interchange of information about data models, termed warehouse metadata in the specification, OMG's new standard for a Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) provides standard ways to run processes that integrate data from multiple warehouses, enabling on-the-fly business data transformation.

CORBAmed, OMG's task force for healthcare, recommended adoption of a Clinical Image Access Service (CIAS) which standardizes access and retrieval of clinical images for non-diagnostic use. Jointly written and submitted by Siemens Health Services and Philips Medical Systems, the new specification provides an important supplement to the well-established DICOM standard that covers diagnostic image transfer.

In addition, the Electronic Commerce Domain Task Force recommended a specification for a CORBA-based Public Key Infrastructure, and the Telecommunications Domain Task Force recommended a specification supporting network management with file transfer functionality.

Architecture Board Election

Once each year, OMG holds an election for members of the Architecture Board (AB), which certifies all RFPs before they are issued, and all technologies before they become OMG specifications. Seven of the eleven seats on the AB were up for election at this meeting. The following candidates were elected: Peter Walker of Sun Microsystems, Michi Henning of Object Oriented Concepts, Jishnu Mukerji of Hewlett Packard Company, David Frankel of Genesis Development Corporation, Tom Rutt of Lucent Technologies, Sean Baker of IONA Technologies, Ltd., and Jeff Mischkinsky of Persistence Software. They join existing members of the Architecture Board: Carol Burt of 2AB, Inc., Nilo Mitra of Ericsson, and Sridhar Iyengar of Unisys Corporation.

New Domain Technology Committee Standards Efforts

The Domain Technology Committee, working on standards in over a dozen vertical markets, issued three new Requests for Proposals for new technology in the area of Life Science Research. These efforts will, when complete, standardize a Chemical Structure Access and Representation facility, computer representation and manipulation of Gene Expression, and an Entity Identification service. Two new Requests for Information ask for information relevant to future standards-setting activities: One asks for information about the Knowledge Management Services Marketplace and Infrastructure, the other about Interoperability for Rail Software Systems.

New Platform Technology Committee Standards Efforts

The Platform Technology Committee, which is responsible for Analysis and Design technology based on OMG's UML specification and infrastructure standards based on CORBA, issued an RFP to standardize CORBA support for data parallel processing which will allow applications to partition processing large data sets across multiple processors.

Board of Directors Actions

The OMG's Board of Directors ratifies recommendations by the technology committees, officially declaring new OMG specifications. At this meeting, the board ratified five new specifications: Enhanced View of Time, Fault Tolerant CORBA, Portable Interceptors (that enable security and technical functions), Management of Event Domains, and a level 2.0 revision of the Ada language mapping. The board also ratified the 1.0 version of the Interoperable Naming specification, Revision 1.7 of CORBAsecurity, and maintenance revisions of the Currency specification and the Person Identifier Service (PIDS).

About The OMG

With the support of its membership of software vendors, software developers and end users, the OMG's CORBA is "The Middleware That's Everywhere(TM)." Since 1989, the OMG has been "Setting The Standards For Distributed Computing(TM)" through its mission to promote the theory and practice of object technology for the development of distributed computing systems. The goal is to provide a common architectural framework for object oriented applications based on widely available interface specifications.

The OMG is headquartered in Needham, MA, USA and has international marketing offices around the world, along with US-based industry-specific representatives. More information on the OMG and CORBA is available at www.omg.org and www.corba.org.

Note to editors: CORBA(R), The Information Brokerage(R), CORBA Academy(R), IIOP(R) and the Object Management Group logo(R) are registered trademarks of the Object Management Group. OMG(TM), Object Management Group(TM), the CORBA Logo(TM), ORB(TM), Object Request Broker(TM), the CORBA Academy logo(TM), XMI(TM), MOF(TM), OMG Interface Definition Language(TM), IDL(TM), CORBAservices(TM), CORBAfacilities(TM), CORBAmed(TM), CORBAnet(TM), UML(TM), the UML Cube Logo(TM), and Unified Modeling Language(TM) are trademarks of the Object Management Group. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners.