Object Management Group
Encyclopedia
Object Management Group (OMG) is a consortium
, originally aimed at setting standards
for distributed object-oriented systems, and is now focused on modeling (programs, systems and business processes) and model-based 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.
, 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
, Richard Soley
, Bill Hoffman and John Slitz. The current leadership includes Chairman and CEO Richard Soley
, President and COO Bill Hoffman and Vice President and Technical Director Andrew Watson.
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.
Today, over 800 companies from both the computer industry and software-using companies from other industries are members of OMG. Since 2000 the OMG's International Headquarters are located in Needham
, Massachusetts
.
As of June 2006 the latest version of UML is 2.1, MOF is 2.0 and XMI is 2.1.
In 2006 the BPMN language specification 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.
(CORBA) standard which appeared in 1991. As of 31 March 2003, the latest standard is CORBA 3.0. OMG has also developed a core set of standards adapting CORBA for embedded and real-time systems. An implementation of standard CORBA is found in the TANGO
software, used in five european particle accelerators (synchrotrons). Implementations of real time CORBA are widely used in control systems in ships and aircraft.
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.
(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.
(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.
Consortium
A consortium is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for achieving a common goal....
, originally aimed at setting standards
Standardization
Standardization is the process of developing and implementing technical standards.The goals of standardization can be to help with independence of single suppliers , compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality....
for distributed object-oriented systems, and is now focused 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.
History
Founded in 1989 by eleven companies (including Hewlett-Packard, IBMIBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
, Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
, American Airlines
American Airlines
American Airlines, Inc. is the world's fourth-largest airline in passenger miles transported and operating revenues. American Airlines is a subsidiary of the AMR Corporation and is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas adjacent to its largest hub at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport...
and Data General
Data General
Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms from the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation. Their first product, the Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicomputer...
), OMG's initial focus was to create a heterogeneous distributed
Distributed computing
Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
object standard. The founding executive team included Christopher Stone
Christopher Stone
Major Christopher Reynolds Stone, D.S.O., M.C. was the first disc jockey in the United Kingdom.He was educated at Eton College and served in the Royal Fusiliers. In 1906 Stone published a book of Sea songs and ballads and in 1923 he wrote the history of his old regiment...
, Richard Soley
Richard Soley
Dr. Richard Mark Soley is the chair and CEO of Object Management Group, Inc. ; as such, the vision and direction of the consortium are his responsibility...
, Bill Hoffman and John Slitz. The current leadership includes Chairman and CEO Richard Soley
Richard Soley
Dr. Richard Mark Soley is the chair and CEO of Object Management Group, Inc. ; as such, the vision and direction of the consortium are his responsibility...
, President and COO Bill Hoffman and Vice President and Technical Director Andrew Watson.
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.
Today, over 800 companies from both the computer industry and software-using companies from other industries are members of OMG. Since 2000 the OMG's International Headquarters are located in Needham
Needham, Massachusetts
Needham is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States. A suburb of Boston, its population was 28,886 at the 2010 census.- History :...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
.
As of June 2006 the latest version of UML is 2.1, MOF is 2.0 and XMI is 2.1.
In 2006 the BPMN language specification was adopted as a standard by OMG.
In 2007 the Business Motivation Model
Business Motivation Model
The Business Motivation Model in enterprise architecture provides a scheme and structure for developing, communicating, and managing business plans in an organized manner...
(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
Governance
Governance is the act of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists of either a separate process or part of management or leadership processes...
, regulatory compliance
Regulatory compliance
In general, compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Regulatory compliance describes the goal that corporations or public agencies aspire to in their efforts to ensure that personnel are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws and...
, business transformation
Business transformation
Business transformation is the fundamental change to the way a business operates, whether that be moving into a new market or operating in a new way It is an approach that attempts to align an organisation's activities relating to people, process and technology more closely with its business...
and strategic planning
Strategic planning
Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy. In order to determine the direction of the organization, it is necessary to understand its current position and the possible avenues...
activities.
In 2009 OMG, together with the Software Engineering Institute
Software Engineering Institute
The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute is a federally funded research and development center headquartered on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. SEI also has offices in Arlington, Virginia, and Frankfurt, Germany. The SEI operates...
at Carnegie Mellon, launched the Consortium of IT Software Quality
CISQ
The Consortium for IT Software Quality is an IT industry leadership group comprising IT executives from the Global 2000, system integrators, outsourced service providers, and software technology vendors committed to making dramatic improvements in the quality of IT application software.Jointly...
(CISQ). CISQ
CISQ
The Consortium for IT Software Quality is an IT industry leadership group comprising IT executives from the Global 2000, system integrators, outsourced service providers, and software technology vendors committed to making dramatic improvements in the quality of IT application software.Jointly...
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.
Common Object Request Broker Architecture
At its founding, OMG set out to create the initial Common Object Request Broker ArchitectureCommon Object Request Broker Architecture
The Common Object Request Broker Architecture is a standard defined by the Object Management Group that enables software components written in multiple computer languages and running on multiple computers to work together .- Overview:CORBA enables separate pieces of software written in different...
(CORBA) standard which appeared in 1991. As of 31 March 2003, the latest standard is CORBA 3.0. OMG has also developed a core set of standards adapting CORBA for embedded and real-time systems. An implementation of standard CORBA is found in the TANGO
TANGO
The TAco Next Generation Objects control system is a free open source object-oriented control system for controlling accelerators, experiments and any kind of hardware or software being actively developed by a consortium of synchrotron radiation institutes.TANGO is a distributed control system....
software, used in five european particle accelerators (synchrotrons). Implementations of real time CORBA are widely used in control systems in ships and aircraft.
Data Distribution Service
Data Distribution ServiceData Distribution Service
Data distribution service for real-time systems is a specification of a publish/subscribe middleware for distributed systems created by the Object Management Group in response to the need to standardize a data-centric publish-subscribe programming model for distributed systems.- History :A few...
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.
Model Driven Architecture
OMG evolved towards modeling standards by creating the standard for Unified Modeling LanguageUnified Modeling Language
Unified Modeling Language is a standardized general-purpose modeling language in the field of object-oriented software engineering. The standard is managed, and was created, by the Object Management Group...
(UML) followed by related standards for
- Meta-Object FacilityMeta-Object FacilityThe Meta-Object Facility is an Object Management Group standard for model-driven engineering. The official reference page may be found at OMG's website.- Overview :...
(MOF), - XML Metadata Interchange (XMI)
- MOF Query/Views/Transformation (QVTQVTQVT is a standard set of languages for model transformation defined by the Object Management Group .- Overview :...
). - Model to text transformation language (MOFM2T).
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
Systems Modeling Language
The Systems Modeling Language is a general-purpose modeling language for systems engineering applications. It supports the specification, analysis, design, verification and validation of a broad range of systems and systems-of-systems. SysML was originally developed by an open source specification...
(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
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
together through the adoption of the Ontology Definition Metamodel which relates UML models in a standard way with RDF
Resource Description Framework
The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...
and Web Ontology Language
Web Ontology Language
The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...
(OWL) models.
Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules
Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules
The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules is an adopted standard of the Object Management Group intended to be the basis for formal and detailed natural language declarative description of a complex entity, such as a business...
(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 ModernizationArchitecture Driven Modernization
Architecture-driven modernization is the name of the initiative of the Object Management Group related to building and promoting standards that can be applied to modernize legacy systems...
(ADM) is the reverse of MDA. ADMTF is an OMG group similar to ADTF with high potential.
Knowledge Discovery Metamodel
Knowledge Discovery Metamodel
Knowledge Discovery Metamodel is publicly available specification from the Object Management Group . KDM is a common intermediate representation for existing software systems and their operating environments, that defines common metadata required for deep semantic integration of Application...
(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
Software modernization
Legacy Modernization, or Software modernization, refers to the conversion, rewriting or porting of a legacy system to a modern computer programming language, software libraries, protocols, or hardware platform...
and software assurance. Knowledge Discovery Metamodel uses Meta-Object Facility
Meta-Object Facility
The Meta-Object Facility is an Object Management Group standard for model-driven engineering. The official reference page may be found at OMG's website.- Overview :...
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
Meta-Process Modeling
Meta-process modeling is a type of metamodeling used in software engineering and systems engineering for the analysis and construction of models applicable and useful to some predefined problems....
.
Abstract Syntax Tree Metamodel (ASTM), a modeling language for fine grained reverse engineering.
Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules
Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules
The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules is an adopted standard of the Object Management Group intended to be the basis for formal and detailed natural language declarative description of a complex entity, such as a business...
(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
- Business models : OMG manages a number of standards for business modeling, including BPMN, the Business Motivation Model (BMM) and the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business RulesSemantics of Business Vocabulary and Business RulesThe Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules is an adopted standard of the Object Management Group intended to be the basis for formal and detailed natural language declarative description of a complex entity, such as a business...
(SBVR) specification.
- Verticals : Considerable progress has also been made in developing vertical model-based standards in the healthcare, finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, software-defined radioSoftware-defined radioA software-defined radio system, or SDR, is a radio communication system where components that have been typically implemented in hardware are instead implemented by means of software on a personal computer or embedded computing devices...
, space/ground systems communications and some dozen other technology areas.
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:- OCRES - OMG Certified Real-time and Embedded Systems Specialist
- OCUP - OMG Certified UML Professional
- OCEB - OMG Certified Expert in Business Process Management (BPM)
- OCSMP - OMG Certified Systems Modeling Professional