Date: Tue, 04 May 1999 15:31:34 -0400 From: Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro gps@kstream.com Subject: MDC and OMG form partnership Austin, Texas - April 20, 1999 - The Meta Data Coalition (MDC) and the Object Management Group (OMG) announced today their first cooperative effort to develop metadata standards. In establishing a formal technical liaison, the MDC is now a Platform Member of the OMG, and the OMG is a member of the MDC. The objective of this cross-membership is to provide a way for the two groups to work together on common standards, based on the belief that standards reduce confusion in the marketplace and increase efficiency for IT organizations. The first working session between the MDC and the OMG took place during the recent OMG Technical Meeting held at the end of March in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The OMG has provided leadership in metadata management starting with issuance of the Repository RFI in 1995, which led to the OMG distributed repository architecture definition in 1996. The Meta Object Facility (MOF) was adopted by the OMG in 1995 and has been refined through the OMG's open, vendor-neutral standards process. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was adopted in 1997. More recently, the OMG embraced W3C XML with the adoption of the XML Metadata Interchange (XMI). These three standards, UML, MOF and XMI, form the foundation of the OMG's modeling and metadata management architecture. This architecture is designed to be technology- and middleware-neutral to foster rapid consensus in the industry in metadata standardization. The MDC was founded in 1995 to develop and provide standardized metadata exchange; the coalition introduced the Meta Data Interchange Specification (MDIS) in 1996. Recently the MDC completed the technical review of the MDC-OIM, a technology-independent and vendor-neutral information model describing the structure and semantics of metadata. The MDC-OIM is based on the Microsoft Open Information Model, a metadata model and specification that is part of Microsoft Repository, a metadata management product. This model was developed by Microsoft, together with over 20 industry-leading companies, and has been reviewed by more than 300 companies as part of Microsoft's Open Process. The MDC-OIM supports the OMG's UML specification. This common basis provides many opportunities for cooperation between the two groups. Collaboration with complementary standards organization and consortia such as ISO, W3C and now the MDC is a key part of the OMG consensus process to minimize overlapping or competing specifications. This vision of embracing vendor-neutral metadata standards is also the goal of the Meta Data Coalition. The Meta Data Coalition (MDC), founded in 1995, is a not-for-profit consortium of close to 50 vendors and end-users whose goal is to provide a tactical solution for metadata exchange. See http://www.MDCinfo.com/ The Object Management Group CORBA is a common Middleware standard. See http://www.omg.org/ See http://www.mdcinfo.com/press/pr19990420.html for full press release.
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