On Different Interoperability Modes in Software Engineering : the Case of Modeling Activities at OMG.
Jean Bézivín · 1998
serve as recommendation basis for a lot of defined and OMG is mainly famous for its CORBA and IDL activities. In the various working groups of this organization, many different themes are however studied, forthcoming normative recommendations for products and processes. This paper discusses some of the running activities at OMG in domains linked to modeling. with the same industrial consensus process that has made From these examples, some conclusions may be drawn: the success of CORBA, IDL, IIOP and many other middleware recommendations. Some of the outcomes of these efforts have already gained an important notoriety, like the Unified Modeling Language UML and its associated constraint language OCL. Others like the MOF • on the high quality and stability of the global OMG decision process, allowing to detect the areas of industrial research arriving to maturity, and then to create a consensus, (Meta-Object Facility, [Crawley 98]) are still less popular • on the success of this mechanism in the middleware but already serve as recommendation basis for a lot of field and on its present deployment in the modeling defined and forthcoming normative recommendations for area, products and processes. This paper discusses some of the running activities at OMG in domains linked to modeling. The main thesis presented here, is that OMG is now centering its activities not only on one interoperability bus, but on two different but related buses: the classical CORBA software bus and the emerging MOF semantic • on the essential business of OMG, namely interoperability; to the “plumbing ” interoperability in the middleware business achieved with CORBA, IDL and IIOP, other more semantic forms of model interoperability are presently emerging, bus. Some illustrations of this recent evolution will be described. • on the practical form of modeling consensus that use to happen at nearly each OMG meeting, and the fact