Contact:
Stephanie Covert
Object Management Group
+1-843-225 8419
pr@omg.org

Call for Participation: OMG's First Software Assurance Workshop:
Working Together for Confidence
March 5-7, 2007; Washington, D.C.

Needham, MA, USA - August 7, 2006 - The Object Management Group™ (OMG™) today announced a call for participation for its first Software Assurance Workshop: Working Together for Confidence. The workshop will take place March 5-7, 2007 in Washington, D.C., USA. The call for participation runs until September 29, 2006. All workshop and call details are available at http://www.omg.org/swa-pr. 

It is becoming increasingly difficult to assess the quality, reliability, performance, robustness, and trustworthiness of systems that often combine consumer-off-the-shelf (COTS), reuse and open source software (OSS) products. Software Assurance - the level of confidence that the software functions as intended and is free of vulnerabilities - becomes even more important especially while facing increased government regulation over information collection and dissemination. Software Assurance is especially important to the defense industry, emergency responders, telecommunications and any other organization with a concern for system and software security. The ultimate goal of Software Assurance is to provide software products - and systems constructed from many software products integrated together - with a high degree of assurance and interoperability.

In this context, the workshop Program Committee is seeking proposals for presentations of experience reports, evaluations, case studies or research papers on topics relevant to (but not limited to):

• Assurance Cases
  • For example, how Assurance Cases provide a framework for thinking about evidence, uncertainty and risk and their sub-areas.
• Standards
  • Existing Data Exchange Standards or examples relevant to Software Assurance Cases.
• Tools and software products
• Case studies / experience reports
• Techniques / methodologies
  • Design Assurance
  • Code Assurance
  • Evidence / data required by existing Certification Methods
  • Approaches to expressing Software Assurance claims, arguments
  • Software Assurance acquisition, development processes
  • Tools and techniques for automating production of Software Assurance evidence via code analysis
  • Tools and techniques for automating construction and verification of Software Assurance claims.
  • The roles of formal methods, static analysis, and dynamic analysis and testing in software security assurance.
• Security Requirements and Specification Assurance
  • Applying security concepts, techniques and tools to safety.
• Research topics in Software Assurance

In addition, proposals for panel sessions and roundtables in any of the above areas are also welcomed. Proposals are welcomed for half-day tutorials on established techniques and standards in any of the areas touched on in this call.

Interested individuals or organizations are invited to submit a brief (up to 600 word) abstract of their proposed workshop presentation and a 100-word or less biography by September 29, 2006 using this web form: http://www.omg.org/abstracts. Visit the website for full details.

The Program Committee will select presentations for inclusion in the program and notify authors by Thursday, October 12, 2006. Final presentation materials will be required from all selected presenters by Friday, February 16, 2007. The final workshop agenda and registration details will be available by Monday, October 16, 2006 and posted at http://www.omg.org/swa-pr. Exhibit space is available; for more information contact Kevin Loughry at loughry@omg.org, or +1-781-444 0404. Sponsorship opportunities are available; contact Ken Berk at ken.berk@omg.org or +1-781-444 0404.

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About The OMG
With well-established standards covering systems and software from design and development, through deployment and maintenance, and extending to evolution to future platforms, the Object Management Group (OMG) supports a full-lifecycle approach to enterprise integration which maximizes ROI, the key to successful IT and system development. OMG's Modeling standards, the basis for the MDA®, include the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®), the Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM™) and other enterprise modeling standards. CORBA®, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is OMG's standard open platform with hundreds of millions of deployments running today. Headquartered in Needham, MA, USA, the Object Management Group is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry specifications consortium. More information about OMG can be found at www.omg.org. 

Note to editors: MDA, Model Driven Architecture, OMG Logo, UML, UML logo and CORBA are registered trademarks, and OMG, Object Management Group, MOF, MDA Logos, OMG SysML and Unified Modeling Language are trademarks, of Object Management Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.