OMG to Adopt Seven New Specifications Including Accounting and Business Facilities; Members Meet in Paris to Enhance CORBA and Modeling Standards.

Business/Technology Editors

NEEDHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 3, 2001

At their recent technical meeting week, members of the Object Management Group (OMG) issued Requests for Proposals (RFP) initiating adoption of seven new standards. Building on the existing OMG general ledger facility, one of the new standards will provide interoperability between Accounts Receivable/Accounts Payable and other accounting functions; another will define a Distributed Accounting Facility for Telecommunications. A third new effort in the business area will standardize representation, storage, and retrieval of skill and competency data used in human resource management. Supporting healthcare, another facility will automate entry and tracking of care-givers' orders in healthcare delivery settings such as hospitals, nursing homes, and doctors' offices. These four new efforts were initiated by OMG's Domain Technology Committee (DTC), which standardizes technology in vertical industries including Manufacturing, Transportation, Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance.

Platform Technology Committee (PTC) Standards Efforts

OMG's PTC works on CORBA infrastructure standards, and on object-oriented analysis and design. Two new efforts from the PTC will work together to extend OMG's data modeling standard, the Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM), with methods that use the Internet to exchange data models and information about them, and build an infrastructure of standard web- and Internet-based services around these exchange methods. The final new RFP will standardize a management interface for CORBA's existing load-balancing capability. One new specification, defining an infrastructure for authorization tokens in CORBAsecurity, finished member evaluation and started the series of votes leading to formal adoption.

Any company may join OMG and respond to the RFPs that define new standards efforts. To access the RFPs, see www.omg.org/schedule. For membership information, see www.omg.org/membership. Dates and locations of future meetings are listed on http://www.omg.org/news/schedule/upcoming.htm.

Meeting Participation and Activities

This OMG Technical Meeting Week, sponsored by Alcatel (www.alcatel.com), Sun Microsystems (www.sun.com), and Thales (www.thalesgroup.com), attracted over 400 OMG members and guests to Paris, France, from April 23 through 27, 2001 where they advanced these and many more standards efforts and participated in other related activities. Over 40 specialists in military and civilian emergency logistics from many countries attended a special Coalition Day devoted to the role of computer interoperability in crisis and logistics management; keynotes were presented by Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Christian Delanghe of France and Lt. Col. (G.S.) Pasi Rikkinen of the Finnish Defense Force. OMG members viewed live demonstrations of CORBA interoperability and of six different CORBA products, and attended tutorials on CORBA, the Object Management Architecture, XML in CORBA systems, event passing in distributed systems, and the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

Election to OMG's Architecture Board

OMG's Architecture Board (AB) evaluates all RFPs and candidate specifications for consistency with the organization's Object Management Architecture and existing specifications. Elected by vote of the organization's Contributing, Platform, and Domain category member companies, AB members normally serve two-year terms. At the Paris meeting, Desmond D'Souza of Kinetium was elected to fill the remaining year of the term of a retiring member.

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. The OMG is a major sponsor of the Integrate 2001 trade show and conference to be held September 19-21, 2001 in New York City.

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.

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), "The Middleware That's Everywhere(TM)" , the CORBA Academy logo(TM), XMI(TM), MOF(TM), CWM(TM), OMG Interface Definition Language(TM), IDL(TM), CORBAservices(TM), CORBAfacilities(TM), CORBAmed(TM), CORBAnet(TM), UML(TM), the UML Cube Logo, "We're Known By The Companies We Connect(TM)", Model Driven Architecture(TM), MDA(TM), OMG Model Driven Architecture(TM), OMG MDA(TM), "The Architecture of Choice for a Changing World(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.