Object Management Group

Object Management Group
Abbreviation OMG
Motto We Set the Standard
Formation 1989
Headquarters

109 Highland Ave

Needham, Massachusetts
Website www.omg.org

The Object Management Group (OMG) is an international, open membership, not-for-profit technology standards consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies and industries. OMG modeling standards enable visual design, execution and maintenance of software and other processes. Originally aimed at standardizing distributed object-oriented systems, the company now focuses on modeling (programs, systems and business processes) and model-based standards.

Overview

OMG provides only specifications, and does not provide implementations. But before a specification can be accepted as a standard by OMG, the members of the winning submitter team must guarantee that they will bring a conforming product to market within a year. This is an attempt to prevent unimplemented (and unimplementable) standards.

Other private companies or open source groups are encouraged to produce conforming products and OMG is attempting to develop mechanisms to enforce true interoperability.

OMG hosts four technical meetings for its members and interested nonmembers. The Technical Meetings provide a neutral forum to discuss, develop and adopt standards that enable software interoperability for a wide range of industries including: finance, manufacturing, healthcare, robotics, software-based communications, security, government, space and more. In March 2015, the TC meeting was held in Reston, VA; in June 2015 in Berlin, Germany, in September 2015, in Cambridge, MA; and in December 2015, the meeting is La Jolla, CA.[1]

History

Founded in 1989 by eleven companies (including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer, American Airlines and Data General), OMG's initial focus was to create a heterogeneous distributed object standard. The founding executive team included Christopher Stone and John Slitz. As of November, 2012, the leadership includes Chairman and CEO Richard Soley, President and COO Bill Hoffman and Vice President and Technical Director Andrew Watson.

Since 2000, OMG international headquarters has been located in Needham, Massachusetts. In November, 2012, the headquarters was moved from 140 Kendrick St to 109 Highland Ave.

OMG Headquarters

The goal was a common portable and interoperable object model with methods and data that work using all types of development environments on all types of platforms.

In 1997, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) was added to the list of OMG adopted technologies. UML is a standardized general-purpose modeling language in the field of object-oriented software engineering.

In June 2005, the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) and OMG announced the merger of their respective Business Process Management (BPM) activities to form the Business Modeling and Integration Domain Task Force (BMI DTF).

In 2006 the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) was adopted as a standard by OMG.

In 2007 the Business Motivation Model (BMM) was adopted as a standard by the OMG. The BMM is a metamodel that provides a vocabulary for corporate governance and strategic planning and is particularly relevant to businesses undertaking governance, regulatory compliance, business transformation and strategic planning activities.

In 2009 OMG, together with the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon, launched the Consortium of IT Software Quality (CISQ). CISQ brings together industry executives from Global 2000 IT organizations, system integrators, outsourcers, and package vendors to jointly address the challenge of standardizing the measurement of IT software quality and to promote a market-based ecosystem to support its deployment.

In 2011 OMG formed the Cloud Standards Customer Council. Founding sponsors included CA, IBM, Kaavo, Rackspace and Software AG. The CSCC is an OMG end user advocacy group dedicated to accelerating cloud's successful adoption, and drilling down into the standards, security and interoperability issues surrounding the transition to the cloud. The Council is not a standards organization, but will complement existing cloud standards efforts and establish a core set of client-driven requirements to ensure cloud users will have the same freedom of choice, flexibility, and openness they have with traditional IT environments. CSCC is open to all end-user organizations.

In September, 2011, the OMG Board of Directors unanimously voted to adopt the Vector Signal and Image Processing Library (VSIPL) as the latest OMG specification. Work for adopting the specification was led by Mentor Graphics' Embedded Software Division, RunTime Computing Solutions, The Mitre Corporation as well as the High Performance Embedded Computing Software Initiative (HPEC-SI). VSIPL is an application programming interface (API) defined by an open standard developed by embedded signal and image processing hardware and software vendors, academia, application developers, and government labs. VSIPL and VSIPL++ contain hundreds of functions used for common signal processing kernel and other computations. These functions include basic arithmetic, trigonometric, transcendental, signal processing, linear algebra, and image processing. The VSIPL family of libraries has been implemented by multiple vendors for a range of processor architectures, including x86, PowerPC, Cell, and NVIDIA GPUs. VSIPL and VSIPL++ are designed to achieve high performance, increase programmer productivity and maintain portability across a range of processor architectures. Additionally, VSIPL++ was designed from the start to include support for parallelism.

Late 2012 early 2013, The Object Management Group Board of Directors adopted the Automated Function Point (AFP) specification.[2] The push for adoption was led by the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ). AFP provides a standard for automating the popular Function Point measure according to the counting guidelines of the International Function Point User Group (IFPUG).

On March 27, 2014, OMG announced it would be managing the newly formed Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). An open-membership, not-for-profit, the IIC will take the lead in establishing interoperability across industrial environments for a more connected world.[3]

Hot Topics

On the company's website, there is a Hot Topics page featuring a few of the different technology areas that are currently trending. As of March 17, 2015, the hot topics include: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Financial Services Standards (FIBO/FIGI), Oil & Gas, Software-defined networking (SDN), Systems Engineering and Threat Modeling.[4]

OMG Standards

Common Object Request Broker Architecture

At its founding, OMG set out to create the initial Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard which appeared in 1991. CORBA is a standard that enables software components written in multiple computer languages and running on multiple computers to work together (i.e., it supports multiple platforms). OMG has also developed a core set of standards adapting CORBA for embedded and real-time systems. Implementations of real time CORBA are widely used in control systems in ships and aircraft.

Data Distribution Service

Data Distribution Service for real-time systems (DDS) is a specification of a publish/subscribe middleware for distributed systems created in response to the need to augment CORBA with a data-centric publish-subscribe specification.[5]

Model Driven Architecture

OMG evolved towards modeling standards by creating the standard for Unified Modeling Language (UML) followed by related standards for:

These together provide the foundation for Model Driven Architecture (MDA), and related set of standards, building upon the success of UML and MOF.

Systems Modeling Language (SysML), a modeling language based on UML for use in Systems Engineering, has been standardized in collaboration with INCOSE.

Significant progress has also been made in bringing the world of UML modeling and the Semantic Web together through the adoption of the Ontology Definition Metamodel which relates UML models in a standard way with RDF and Web Ontology Language (OWL) models.

Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is a landmark for the OMG, the first OMG specification to incorporate the formal use of natural language in modeling and the first to provide explicitly a model of formal logic. Based on a fusion of linguistics, logic, and computer science, and two years in preparation, SBVR provides a way to capture specifications in natural language and represent them in formal logic so they can be machine-processed. SBVR is an integral part of MDA.

Architecture Driven Modernization

Architecture Driven Modernization (ADM) is the reverse of MDA. ADMTF is an OMG group similar to ADTF with high potential.

Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM), a common intermediate representation for existing software systems and their operating environments. Knowledge Discovery Metamodel is designed as the OMG's foundation for software modernization and software assurance. Knowledge Discovery Metamodel uses Meta-Object Facility to define an XMI interchange format between tools that work with existing software and an abstract interface for the next-generation assurance and modernization tools.

The Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM) is an OMG-standard for Meta-Process Modeling.

Abstract Syntax Tree Metamodel (ASTM), a modeling language for fine grained reverse engineering.

Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) and KDM are designed as two parts of a unique OMG Technology Stack for software analytics related to existing software systems. KDM defines an ontology related to software artifacts and thus provides an initial formalization of the information related to a software system. SBVR is further used to formalize complex compliance rules related to the software.

Domain models

Software assurance and regulatory compliance

New activities have been initiated to address important concerns of Regulatory Compliance and Software Assurance, building upon the base standards of MDA.

Certification

OMG offers a number of professional certifications:

In 2013, OMG Intermediate updates expected to be released in the next few months.[10]

Notes

  1. ↑ OMG Upcoming Events
  2. ↑ http://www.omg.org/news/releases/pr2013/01-17-13.htm>
  3. ↑ http://www.omg.org/news/releases/pr2014/03-27-14.htm
  4. ↑ http://www.omg.org/hot-topics/index.htm
  5. ↑ As of December 2005 the latest standard is DDS 1.2, with version 1.3 currently available to OMG members.
  6. ↑ OCEB - OMG Certified Expert in Business Process Management (BPM)
  7. ↑ OCUP - OMG Certified UML Professional
  8. ↑ OCSMP - OMG Certified Systems Modeling Professional
  9. ↑ OCRES - OMG Certified Real-time and Embedded Systems Specialist
  10. ↑ BPM Certification Program Updated By OMG

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, February 10, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.