MDC AND OMG COMBINE EFFORTS TO ESTABLISH META-DATA STANDARDS

Two separate standards groups, the Meta Data Coalition (MDC) and the Object Management Group (OMG), have entered into a cooperative agreement to take on the onerous task of developing a single set of meta-data standards.

Under the agreement, the MDC is now a Platform member of the OMG, and the OMG is a member of the MDC. The two groups have already begun working toward establishing a single set of standards, with the first working session between them taking place at the OMG Technical Meeting in March. Some, however, question the pair's capability to succeed in establishing a standard for what is a highly proprietary market.

"If there could be one unified standard for specifying meta data, that would make customer's lives easy, but that's not the way things are," said David Downing, vice president of marketing at Informatica, a business intelligence software vendor in Palo Alto, Calif. "Essentially, you're not going to have one standard; you're going to have competing, proprietary meta-data standards centered around the Oracle world, the Microsoft world, or the IBM world."

Until now, the MDC has focused on providing standardized meta-data exchange, including its 1996 Meta Data Interchange Specification. The MDC has also worked on developing a vendor-neutral information model describing the structure and semantics of meta data.

The OMG has spent the past five years focusing on meta-data management. Most recently, the OMG has developed a distributed repository architecture definition, the Meta Object Facility (MOF), and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The OMG has also adopted the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Metadata Interchange, which, along with the UML and MOF, make up the foundation of the OMG's modeling and meta-data management architecture.

According to Downing, it could be XML, and not any standard developed by the two groups, that will ultimately unify meta data.

"XML is probably going to become the unified standard for specifying and unifying meta data across repositories, solving some of these proprietary battles going on between Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM," Downing said. "Ideally there will be a standard XML specification, and that will be the way companies will be able to deal with the meta-data issue."

The Meta Data Coalition, in Austin, Texas, is at http://www.mdc.com. The Object Management Group, in Framingham, Mass., is at http://www.omg.com.