META DATA COALITION DRIVES NEW KEY INITIATIVES

The Meta Data Coalition (MDC), a not-for-profit organization in the process of standardizing metadata, announced several new key initiatives as part of its technical meeting Nov. 11. In July 1999, the membership of the Meta Data Coalition ratified the MDC-OIM 1.0, which provides the basic meta-model for representing databases and the interrelationships between them. The new initiatives will extend the model into several key areas such as business models and information portals. This will enable the integration of an even larger set of tools and business applications using the MDC-OIM and its XML interchange format.

As a result of the Metadata Coalition's membership exchange with the Object Management Group (OMG), the data warehousing part of the MDC-OIM has been used as a design reference for the OMG's CWMI (Common Warehouse Metadata Interchange). With the continued co-operation between the technical task forces of both organizations, the metadata standards will be aligned.

"In a topic as large and important as data warehouse metadata, NCR sees advantage in the cohesiveness of the MDC-OIM across multiple domains and the integration of CWMI in OMG standards," explains Vickie Farrell, assistant vice President, Teradata Marketing, NCR. "We believe that alignment between MDC-OIM and CWM can be achieved through the ongoing model review exchanges, common notations (UML, XML) and common semantics."

Part of the standardization of metadata types is to capture and formalize business rules, which are statements that define or govern the processes of a business and the interrelationships among various data elements. The MDC is developing a standard for the specification of business rules and the mechanism for exchanging these rules through XML. The MDC has formed an alliance with the Business Rules Group (author of the white paper that defined the first comprehensive business rules classification), who will participate in the MDC technical meetings.

"One of the biggest impediments remaining to the interchange of metadata is the exchange of business rules," remarked Kay Hammer, President and CEO of ETI and Co-chair of the MDC. "The work under way and the contribution of the Business Rules Group will be of immense value to vendors and customers."

The MDC has established a collaboration with the European Commission's ESPRIT Project ATLAS, which is headed by Unisoft, Greece. ATLAS incorporates technologies for real-time business information systems and plans to use the MDC-OIM Business Engineering and Knowledge Management Models to drive the transition from online to real-time business information systems.

"The collaboration will bring forward standardization issues, as well as introduce a market driven approach in a set of innovative research activities," adds Adamantios Koumpis from Unisoft S.A. and Project Manager of ATLAS.

A component model specifies component interfaces and describes the design, assembly and deployment of components into a system, based on some standard component architectural style. The new model provides the necessary metadata types for these descriptions. The work is based on the meta-model of Catalysis, a UML-based methodology for end-to-end component-based development.

"We are pleased that our work on Catalysis forms the basis for a definitive information model standard for components in the MDC-OIM," said Desmond D'Souza, co-author of the Catalysis method and senior vice president of component-based development at Computer Associates. "Catalysis is component-based from the ground-up, and the new model enables tool support for all leading component architectural styles. It supports an assembly approach to design, architecture and even requirements."

For more information, visit http://www.MDCinfo.com.