Platform Technology Committee (PTC) Standards Efforts.

OMG's PTC works on standards that affect the CORBA infrastructure, and on object-oriented analysis and design. At this meeting, the PTC initiated work on a standard that will integrate the new protocol SOAP with OMG's CORBA architecture. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) transmits business data expressed in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) over the widely-used web protocol HTTP. In order to take full advantage of this new protocol, enterprises need to integrate it with their existing computing infrastructure. When complete less than a year from now, the new standard will enable this integration by allowing SOAP clients to invoke CORBA servers, and CORBA clients and servers to interoperate using SOAP.

Also in the infrastructure arena, the PTC initiated efforts to standardise methods to transmit CORBA network packets through firewalls, and to adapt Real-Time Object Request Brokers to emit alternative protocols needed for, e.g., telecommunications or other Real-Time applicatios. The PTC also initiated efforts to standardise a mapping from 0MG IDLTM (Interface Definition Language) to WMLscript, a scripting language based on the Wireless Markup Language, and to standardise an activation framework for persistent CORBA servers. Two PTC standardisation efforts completed their evaluation phase and started the final series of votes that will promote them to official 0MG specification status: CSIv2 (Common Secure Interoperability, version 2), a protocol supporting secure:, interoperability between different vendors' CORBA products, and Additional Structuring Mechanisms for the Object Transaction Service, supporting long-lived distributed transactions that occur, for example, when arranging a meeting on many people's schedules, or making travel reservations involving an airline; hotel, and rental car company.

UML, one of the OMG's most widely-used standards, supports object-oriented analysis and design and forms a basis for OMG's other modelling standards including g the CWMTM (Common Metamodel). Issuance of three RFPs (Request For Proposal) started the process of defining a new major release of the U7ML standard. The three RFPs cover UML Infrastructure, UML Superstructure, and Object Constraint Language (OCL).

Industry-Specific Technology

OMG's Domain Technology Committee (DTC) standardises technology in vertical industries including Manufacturing, Transportation, Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance. Clinical Trials, the last stage in the testing of new drugs before they can be approved for general use, generate large amounts of data. A new facility, to be standardised by OMG's Life Science Research Domain Task Force, will allow these data to pass from one stage of analysis to another, or to persistent storage, using standard interfaces and representations.

Another new standardisation effort will produce a CORBA-based Payroll Facility with interfaces expressed in 0MG IDL. The DTC charters Task Forces to standardise technology in different areas. At this meeting, the DTC chartered a new Space Domain Task Force, working on CORBA based space, satellite and ground system software.