Happy New Year!
| The year 2012 was an exciting one at OMG. Besides a host
of events that were attended or held by the company, some
very influential standards were adopted, important liaisons
were formed, exciting milestones were reached, and various
other happenings took place to make this past year a
fantastic one In March, OMG members met in Reston, VA for the first
technical meeting of 2012. During the week, the Board of
Directors voted to adopt the hData RESTful Transport
specification. The hData RESTful Transport specification
provides an accessible electronic method for
exchanging patient health information among |
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| doctors,
hospitals and clinics. The weekend after the
meeting, OMG and the Eclipse Foundation hosted the
3rd Biannual Workshop on Eclipse Open Source
Software and OMG Open Specifications. The workshop
included a series of discussion sessions on OMG
standards and corresponding Eclipse projects. The
focus was to facilitate alignment between current
specifications and implemented software and to
identify areas where the cooperation could be
further improved. |
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The next time OMG members met, was in Cambridge, MA in
June. At this meeting, the Board of Directors adopted the
Async Method Invocation for CORBA Component Model and IDL to
C++11 Language Mapping. Two informational events were held
during the week: the Healthcare Interoperability Information
Day and the Smart Energy Information Day. In addition, a new
group was chartered during the week: the SMART Data
Coalition Domain Special Interest Group. In August, OMG went
on to partner with the Data Transparency Coalition to form
the SMART Regulation Task Force. The purpose of this task
force is to advocate the incorporation of data standards in
U.S. federal regulation, as well as encourage regulatory
agencies to use electronic standardization to clarify their
rules, facilitate cheaper compliance, sharpen their
enforcement capabilities, and move toward greater
transparency. |
OMG formed another important liaison relationship with
XBRL International, Inc. (XII) in order to develop a
standard abstract model for the XBRL language. As a
consequence, OMG became a Direct Association member of XII
while XII became a Domain Member of OMG.
The third quarterly technical meeting took place in
Jacksonville, FL during the week of September 10th. At this
meeting, the OMG Board of Directors unanimously voted to
adopt the Vector Signal and Image Processing Library
specification for C and C++. VSIPL and VSIPL++- as they are
known- are application programming interfaces that are
designed to achieve high performance, increase programmer
productivity and maintain portability across a range of
processor architectures. The Board also adopted the Dynamic
Deployment & Configuration for Robot Technology Components.
| 2012 also marked the 15th anniversary of the Unified
Modeling Language (UML) being adopted as an official OMG
specification! This memorable year for the standard
continued as multiple revisions were adopted: in
Jacksonville, the Board adopted the UML Profile for NIEM; in
December, it adopted the UML Specification Simplification;
and in recent days, it has adopted the TelecoUML
Finalization Task Force and the fUML Revision Task Force.
The final meeting of the year took place in Burlingame,
CA the week of December 10th. In addition to the UML Profile
for NIEM, the Board of Directors adopted the Healthcare
Community Services Provider Directory. |
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Besides the quarterly meetings, OMG hosted a workshop on
Real-time, Embedded and Enterprise-Scale Time-Critical
Systems in Paris, France. The workshop featured tutorials on
Data Distribution System (DDS) and the CORBA Component Model
as well as provided a forum for software engineers and
researchers to learn about new design approaches, share
their experiences and discover emerging standards. OMG also
partnered with Health Level Seven® (HL7) and HIMSS to
produce “Interconnected Health 2012: Enabling Health through
High-Impact IT,” a three-day program in Chicago, IL. The
goal of the event was to focus on approaches, challenges and
solutions affecting the ability to connect health
organizations and systems, as well as the role of IT as an
enabler in achieving this connectivity.
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In standards development, the Systems Assurance Task
Force issued a Request for Information (RFI) for creating
the “Assuring Dependability of Consumer Devices” standard.
This standard will ensure that Consumer Devices and
Automotive Electronics-industrial products used in diverse,
open and dynamic environments, such as automobiles, consumer
electronics and smart houses- are dependable throughout the
development and operational phases. Responses were due by
May 20th with the members of the task force now reviewing
them. Expect more exciting announcements from this corner in
the coming year as the standard continues on the road
towards adoption. |
| You may have also noticed we’re featuring a brand-new
address this year. That’s right: at the end of October, we
moved down the street to new offices. Not only is our new
home right off the highway, making commuting a breeze, but
we’re right across the street from various new luncheon
restaurants! You can now find us at: 109 Highland Ave,
Needham, MA 02494 |
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Finally, 2012 was a successful year for validating and
promoting OMG standards. In a triumphant display of an OMG
standard’s interoperability, five OMG member organizations
demonstrated wire-protocol interoperability between their
independently developed implementations of the DDS standard.
The demonstration was a success as data was seamlessly
exchanged using nine different scenarios across
applications. On the heels of this accomplishment, we were
pleased to learn that seven OMG specifications were formally
published as 2012 IS/IEC Standards. These standards
included:
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- OCL 2.3.1
- ADM/KDM 1.3
- UML 2.4.1 Infrastructure
- UML 2.4.1 Superstructure
- CORBA 3.1.1 Interfaces
- CORBA 3.1.1 Interoperability
- CORBA 3.1.1 Components
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In recent days, the Board has also adopted the Automated
Function Point (AFP) specification. AFP provides an industry
standard for automating the popular Function Point measure
as closely to the guidelines of the International Function
Point User Group as possible. Automated-as opposed to
manual- counting reduces costs and eliminates inconsistency
problems.
With all of these various successes and milestones
marking 2012 as a success, we at OMG are looking forward to
an equally fruitful and productive year in 2013. We would
like to thank all of our members and all those who have
contributed and participated throughout the year and we look
forward to your
continued involvement in the years to come.
With best wishes for 2013,
The OMG Staff
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Meet an OMG Member: Dr. Øystein Haugen
.jpg) Dr. Øystein Haugen is a Senior Researcher at SINTEF,
the largest independent research organization in
Scandinavia. Øystein is based out of Oslo, Norway
and has been an active member for over 10 years. We
sat down with Øystein to find out a bit more about
his time as an OMG member:
OMG:
Hi Øystein! When did you join OMG and why
did you become a member?
ØH: In fact it [has been] more than 10 years since I
joined OMG. The first records of an OMG meeting that
I have [are] from Orlando in December 2000, and I
have been a regular attendant with only small gaps
due to changing of jobs since then. I have been
involved with standardization of modeling languages
since 1989, but in the International Telecom Union
standardizing modeling languages SDL and MSC. In
1997 I joined Ericsson and there was a very active
discussion in the company whether to go for SDL or
UML in the future. Following the decision to focus
on UML, it became clear that we needed to make sure
that UML became what Ericsson wanted which again
meant that UML needed to learn from SDL and MSC.
This was our background for joining forces with
Motorola, Telelogic (later bought by IBM), and
others to create the brand new UML 2.0. My longtime
colleague Birger Møller-Pedersen and I were the
natural candidates to help make UML 2.0 a more
precise and useful (for Ericsson and other telecom
companies) language with our background from SDL and
MSC.
OMG:
How has being a part of OMG helped you or
your company?
ØH: OMG has been important for achieving what we
wanted for Ericsson-a better UML for the kind of
model-oriented engineering that we had done for
years in Ericsson. We feel that we achieved that
even though we would have liked UML to have been
defined much more formally than it was in 2000-2004.
Now more than 10 years later it approaches the
precision that we once wanted. When I changed jobs
and went to University of Oslo as an Associate
Professor OMG was less important, but still served
as a place for meeting the brightest people and the
most innovative minds. Changing again in 2007 to
SINTEF (Norway’s largest research company) OMG again
came into my focus since standardization is a valid
way to let practical research results live beyond
the lives of projects. My main target was to promote
standardizing a language for variability modeling,
but I had my fingers in UML as well as profiles like
SoaML and UML Testing Profile.
OMG:
What project/specification are you currently
working on with OMG?
ØH: My main focus over the last few years has been
the Common Variability Language where I organize the
Joint Submission Team and where we submitted the
revised submission before the September meeting.
Hopefully it will shortly be adopted.
OMG:
Why would you encourage other professionals
to join OMG?
ØH: OMG is valuable from many different
perspectives. For the small tool vendors OMG may
provide standards that let the small SME’s play on
the same field as the big ones through interfacing
through the same technology. For the large industry
OMG may provide means to establish the fundaments of
multiple vendors of support tooling. For the
academic, OMG is a challenge because you have to
defend your ideas in a larger context, and for the
industrial researcher, OMG is a vehicle for
disseminating industrial results to a wider
community in a form that many companies can attach
to.
Other
Resources
For more information on OMG or any of our advocacy groups,
such as the CSCC, visit us online at
www.omg.org. Members
should sign up for their own personal
myOMG page to
access and manage your email lists, submissions and interests.
Did you know…
Did you know that we have several RSS feeds on the OMG website? Visit
us online to subscribe!
Note: All photos courtesy of Dr. Richard Soley and
Dr. Jon Siegel unless indicated
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Next Meeting: Reston, VA March 18th-22nd
We’re heading back to Reston, VA for our March technical
meeting! The upcoming meeting will take place at the Hyatt
Regency from March 18th-22nd. The week will be filled with
numerous special events including:
- The Business Architecture Innovation Summit: In
collaboration with the Business Architecture Guild, this
two-day event (Tuesday, March 19th and Wednesday, March
20th) will bring together practitioners and industry leaders
to share business architecture best practices, deployment
strategies and real-life experiences. An impressive list of
speakers includes:
- Ford Motor Company Senior Manager-Enterprise
Engineering, Eric Karsten
- The Boeing Company Associate Technical Fellow,
Enterprise Architecture, Steve DuPont
- Mastercard Senior Consultant, John Baker
- United Airlines Principal Enterprise Architect,
Diana Krohn
- Nordstrom, Inc. Enterprise Architect, Scott Whitmire
- “Big Data in the Cloud: Preparing for the Future”: a
conference hosted by the Cloud Standards Customer Council
(Monday, March 18th). Focusing on cloud-based Big Data
applications and tools, the conference will help end-user
organizations plan future cloud-based Big Data initiatives.
- The Component Information Day: (Monday, March 18th) This
info day will provide a forum for practitioners to present
and discuss activities and direction for future Distributed,
Real-time and Embedded software intensive standards work. In
particular, the day will provide a forum to share and
discuss ideas for the next revision or reincarnation of the
OMG CORBA Component Model specification.
- The Data Distribution Service (DDS) Information Day:
(Wednesday, March 20th) The program will include case
studies of successful DDS uses, a high-level tutorial and
the ever-popular DDS interoperability demonstration. A wide
range of implementers will be presenting and participating
throughout the day.
- PrismTech OpenSplice DDS Demonstration: OpenSplice is
one of the most advanced, complete and widely-used
implementations of DDS. Taking place Tuesday night, this
demo is the perfect complement for attendees of the DDS
information Day.
- The Semantics Information Day-(Tuesday, March
19th-Wednesday, March 20th) Discussions and tutorials will
include implemented solutions involving semantics in
healthcare, finance, government and more. In particular,
major themes will be sought that will provide requirements
and drive future relevant standards.
Recent Adoptions: Automated Function Point (AFP)
Led by the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) and
David Herron, coauthor of Function Point Analysis and leader of
the international team that developed the standard, the
Automated Function Point (AFP) was voted as an OMG specification
by the Board of Directors in an early January vote.
AFP provides a standard for automating the popular Function
Point measure according to the counting guidelines of the
International Function Point User Group. Function Points measure
the size of IT application software by measuring the business
functionality the application provides to users. The Function
Point count is a critical input for other parameters such as
cost effectiveness and productivity.
“This seemingly innocuous new standard is in fact a watershed
moment for software quality, software security, software
integration and even project estimation: the first new,
consistent, automatable code size metric since the creaking and
ancient ‘lines of code’ measure,” said OMG’s Chairman and CEO,
Dr. Richard Soley.
Like all OMG-adopted standards, AFP is available for free
download by the public on www.omg.org.
Follow OMG!
- We’re on
Twitter: @objectmgmtgroup and @Cloud_Council
- LinkedIn:
OMG
and
CSCC
- Facebook:
OMG
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Follow Richard Soley as he travels the globe and blogs about it!
Read Richard’s “On the Road” blog!
(RSS feed is available.) |
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