OMG and Internet SIG Meeting

Washington D.C., 3-6 June 1996
Craig Thompson
Object Services and Consulting, Inc.

Craig Thompson participated in the OMG meeting held in Washington D.C. on 3-6 June 1996 as follows:

• Co-chaired OMG Internet SIG Meeting. Thompson and Shel Sutton (MITRE) co-chaired this 2-day OMG Internet SIG meeting. Around 95 people attended. This was a joint meeting of OMG Internet SIG and the DoD Intelligence community's Intelink Engineering Board (IEB) aimed at exposing both groups to the others' requirements and progress. Thompson presented an overview of OMG and OMG Internet SIG and completed minutes for the meeting now available on our ISIG web site (http://www.objs.com/isig/home.htm).
• DMSO, Imaging/GIS, and C4I. Key Government members of DMSO and the Imaging/GIS communities participated in the Internet SIG and are adopting OMG IDL. Thompson encouraged these attendees to form OMG SIGs in these areas to provide a forum for industry and Government to share specifications. A workshop on C4I was held on Friday but was not well advertised though it had an interesting agenda and unfortunately Thompson had to return to Dallas to meet with a job candidate and so missed it. There is not currently an OMG C4I SIG.
• Authored OMG Internet Services Architecture RFI. Craig Thompson authored a Request for Information for an Internet Services Architecture. See Attachment D below. The details: Thompson led a work session that considered whether to upgrade the OMG Internet SIG to a Task Force so it can issue RFIs and RFPs to industry for Internet services and extensions to the OMG architecture for "scaling the OMG OMA to the Internet." This discussion led us to the conclusion that we should try to issue the Request for Information drafted before the meeting by Thompson at this OMG meeting and defer until two or more meetings from now the question of whether to upgrade Internet SIG to a task force since it may be that existing task forces or ISIG itself can do the work that the RFI identifies. Following the Internet SIG meeting, Thompson presented the RFI at the Common Facilities and ORB/OS task force meetings. Both groups agreed to issue the RFI (with minor changes) and finally it was voted on at the OMG Platform SIG meeting and issued by ORB/OS (with some minor revisions). The RFI is on our web site (http://www.objs.com/isig/rfi.htm) and will be issued by press release by OMG soon with responses due on 26 August 1996. Thompson completed editing the RFI in html and sent it to OMG for release announcement.
• CFTF Rules Service. Thompson supported the NIIIP Consortium's effort to schedule a Rules Management Service onto the Common Facilities Task Force Roadmap. He had previously (in 1994 with Stanley Su, U Florida) drafted the CFTF Rules Service description. Before this OMG meeting he scheduled a presentation by Herman Lam (U Florida) onto the CFTF agenda and he reviewed the presentation before it was made providing feedback. Lam made the presentation. We then passed a motion to draft and issue an RFP for a Rules Service in two meetings, with Dave Zenie (IBM) and Thompson responsible for drafting and editing the RFP. This should be easy since the RFP is basically a template plus the rules service description we already completed. If we complete the RFP quickly, it can be on the agenda for the Madrid OMG meeting.
• IIOP/IETF dinner meeting. Thompson attended a meeting to discuss how OMG should stage its Internet Interoperability Protocol (IIOP) into the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). A decision was made not to issue the current IIOP to IETF since Bill Janssen (Xerox PARC, ILU architect) argued it will be viewed as inferior by some key IETF protocol designers. Instead, Janssen and any interested companies will work with W3C to design an improved IIOP that W3C will try to make the basis for a web object model. Overall it is felt that the Web has the momentum and OMG needs to target there and the IETF "brand" is currently less important. No mention of Java in this picture though Thompson asked Andrew Watson, Bill Janssen, and some others if they see it playing as important a role as we think it might and they seem to think it will not, in the long run.
• In addition, Thompson attended the OMG Chairs Dinner and portions of the OMG ORB/OS Task Force and Common Facilities Task Force meetings. This was the largest OMG meeting to date with around 600 attendees.
• The CORBA 2.0 specification (http://www.omg.org/corbask.htm ) is now available on-line.

Thompson updated the OBJS-maintained ISIG homepage to reflect outcomes of the OMG ISIG meeting (including the RFI) and completed an ISIG document log. He sent email to OMG staff to update their document log and to OMG TC and Internet SIG to alert them to the finished documents.