OMG Members Meet in Toronto, Charter Web Services Special Interest Group; Multiple Activities Advance Model Driven Architecture Specifications.

Business/Technology Editors

NEEDHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 20, 2001

The Object Management Group(TM)'s (OMG(TM)) latest Technical Meeting Week, sponsored by IBM Canada (http://www.ibm.com/ca/en/), attracted hundreds of OMG members and guests to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, from September 10 through 14 where they advanced the organization's standards efforts and participated in other related activities.

OMG is the consortium most experienced in multi-platform integration, and the group's Model Driven Architecture(TM) (MDA(TM)) integrates middleware protocols including new ones as they appear on the market. At this meeting, OMG chartered a Web Services Special Interest Group, which will focus members' work on MDA-based integration of this developing technology with existing middleware and legacy applications.

Everyone at the meeting was saddened by the tragic events of Tuesday, September 11. Our hearts go out to all of the victims and their families.

Model Driven Architecture (MDA) Activities and Developments

Multiple activities focused on the OMG's new Model Driven Architecture (MDA): Members completed a vote making the MDA the new official basis of OMG standards, and modified OMG policies and procedures to enable this. On Wednesday afternoon, members attended the debut of an informational presentation on MDA that will be repeated in five cities across North America during October. To find the presentation closest to your city, see www.omg.org/mda/seminar.

OMG's Unified Modeling Language(TM) (UML(TM)), which provides the basis for the MDA, is currently undergoing a major upgrade to Release 2.0. At this meeting, OMG members evaluated proposals for two parts of this new release: UML Infrastructure, and the Object Constraint Language. These proposals will be revised over the next several months to take into account member comments, and then presented at a future meeting for re-evaluation and subsequent adoption. The remaining parts of the revision, UML Superstructure and Diagram Interchange, will be evaluated at OMG's next meeting in Dublin, Ireland, to be held during the week of November 9, 2001.

New OMG Specifications

Of the five new specifications which passed final member evaluation and started the adoption vote process at the meeting, three enhance OMG's modeling specifications: one tailors the UML to Enterprise Distributed Object Computing; another adds the ability to model scheduling for real-time computing systems, while the third enables XMI, OMG's XML-based model interchange language, to take advantage of the W3C's new XML schema definition. Two additional specifications enhance OMG's vendor-independent middleware specification, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA(R)), in key areas: One defines a facility to manage membership in security domains, while the other provides air traffic control systems with a standard facility to manage surveillance of aircraft.

New Standards Efforts Initiated

The OMG initiates the process that defines new standards by issuing a Request for Proposals (RFP). At this meeting, members issued two RFPs to enhance CORBA: One will define a procedure and set of interfaces for online upgrades, standardizing the way CORBA systems provide 7X24 service without interruption for software upgrades; the other will standardize an MDA-based publish-subscribe data distribution service for real-time CORBA systems. Any company may join OMG and submit in response to an RFP. These and all other active RFPs may be accessed from the web page www.omg.org/schedule. Membership information appears at www.omg.org/membership. Dates and locations of future meetings are listed on www.omg.org/news/schedule/upcoming.htm.

Technology Adoptions

Following member evaluation and vote, a ballot of OMG's Board of Directors (BoD) makes a submission document an official specification. At this meeting, the BoD created seven new standards. Four enhance CORBA in various areas: One defines a protocol for distributed event notification based on IP multicast; another standardizes an architecture for parallel processing of large data volumes; the third defines a service that provides authorization tokens for the CORBA security service; and the last of these defines interfaces to a dynamic scheduling service for real-time CORBA systems. A metamodel for software process engineering enhances UML. Two new standards belong to specific industries: interfaces to a set of CAD services for manufacturing, and laboratory machine control interfaces defined by OMG's Life Science Research task force.

Meeting Participation and Activities

Every OMG meeting is an occasion for tutorials and associated gatherings. At this meeting, tutorials covered OMG's specification suite, the new standards issued under the banner CORBA 3, and the UML, in addition to the MDA informational seminar. A full-day workshop focusing on High Confidence and Safety Critical computing systems attracted over 50 attendees. Two outside organizations met in Toronto to work with OMG subgroups: The CCAPI (Command Center Application Programming Interface) International Working Group of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) met with OMG's Utilities Domain Task Force, and the Human Resources XML (HRXML) Consortium met with OMG's HR Domain Special Interest Group. Five companies demonstrated implementations of OMG-standardized technology.

About The OMG

With well-established standards covering software from design, through development, to deployment and maintenance, the Object Management Group (OMG) supports a full-lifecycle approach to enterprise integration. Based on the established Object Management Architecture (OMA) and emerging Model Driven Architecture (MDA), OMG's standards cover application design and implementation. OMG's Modeling standards include the UML (Unified Modeling Language) and CWM (Common Warehouse Metamodel). CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is OMG's standard open platform. OMG also issues the CORBAservices and a rapidly-growing set of industry-specific standards in vertical markets including healthcare, telecommunications, biotechnology, transportation and a dozen other areas. The OMG is headquartered in Needham, MA, USA, with an office in Tokyo, Japan as well as international marketing offices in the UK and Germany, along with a U.S. government representative in Washington, DC.

For information on joining the OMG or additional information, please contact OMG headquarters by phone at [phone], by fax at [phone], or by email at [e-mail]. The OMG provides current information and services for distributed enterprise computing on the World Wide Web at www.omg.org and www.corba.org. Information about OMG Japan can be found at www.omgj.org.

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