Overall. This OMG meeting was less vital than others but by the end of the five-day meeting our Internet SIG seemed to revitalize the entire group. Hallway meetings were more productive for OBJS than most of the main meetings, except that the Internet SIG work is making a big difference.
C4I Working Group. Bhavani (MITRE) is chair and Tom Mowbray (MITRE) is facilitator (Tom is standing down from Common Facilities Task Force chair at this OMG meeting.). A web page contains some information, mainly a Survey to C4I Providers (but not minutes of past working group meetings!): http://www.serve.com/mowbray/omgc4i.html. This group elected a UK MOD (United Kingdom Ministry of Defense) co-chair to insure international participation. The main business was not contentful but consisted mainly of revising a description of work to date which seems to unnecessarily overclaim that C4I WG has been the principal reason why the OMG Board commissioned The Open Group (TOG) to provide conformance testing for CORBA-based standards. Some of this group think DARPA is doing OK work on JTF/ATD C4I vision but not transferring this technology to the much larger C4I community. I was told that John Schill and Teknowledge have had a falling out over the Teknowledge Webserver's implementation.
OMG Internet SIG. This meeting was very successful - it's work (much of it done by OBJS) is providing a major wake up call and direction change to both ORBOS and Common Facilities Task Forces (the two most powerful at OMG). See separate trip report (OMG Internet SIG, Minutes of Meeting #8) and below at end.
ORB/OS Platform Task Force. Business items include IDL COBOL Mapping, adjusting COMCORBA dates, support requirements for Business Object Facilities, and joint session on Friday with Electronic Commerce, Common Facilities, ORB/OS, and Internet SIG with respect to Internet RFPs (see below).
Common Facilities Platform Task Force. Business items included discussion with OMG Internet SIG, two Printing Facilities initial submissions, the Asian input facilities status, meta object evaluation criteria, deferring discussion on change management to email discussions, and CORBA Facilities needed by the Financial Domain Task Force.
Telecom Domain Task Force. Notification Service RFP discussions and TINA-presentation, a Sockets++ discussion, ORBOS messaging RFP discussion, topology service, scalability issues [did not attend this meeting]
Chair's Dinner. [Skipped this Tuesday night since last two were unexciting. So was this by report.]
Business Object Facility. I attended ½ a day of this meeting. The BOF is progressing organizationally and is an unfortunate example of the Emperor's new clothes, I think, but raises some issues. It is not clear if a BOF has a fixed collection of features or is all things to all people. It is clear that it is a system and not a toolkit. . It is not clear if it is built on OMG services or is a monolithic system. The issue for us is if it is OK to build systems from components but not expose the sub interfaces of the component systems. Obviously, this is OK but when do we want to do this and when not? Obviously, for reusable components but when is a component reusable? I do not think this makes sense as an OMG standard in this case. BOF/MOF/OA&D met in the afternoon to discuss boundaries between their work - I missed this since I attended the GIS SIG meeting. Instead I wrote an email exposing the issues and sent it to the evaluation group.
GIS almost-a-SIG (and now is). I attended a ½ day meeting of this group, led by Shel Sutton (MITRE), who chairs a subcommittee on imaging in the Open GIS Consortium and co-chairs the Internet SIG. GIS should be generalized to Geospatial SIG. I listened to presentations from the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) president David Schell and its CTO Kurt Buehler. They want querying of heterogeneous GIS data sources and have all the organization and not enough of the architecture to get it. They represent big Government/DoD need and might be a perfect target for OBJS. They are thick with Carl Cargill, Netscape's standards guru. We have architecture they want and they have a fun, well-connected, well-defined domain we might want. At the Domain PTC meeting on Friday, the GIS SIG was officially created. It will be dominated by OGC, who wants to refocus from monolithics GIS system to the wider geospatial domain.
Object Model Subcommittee. This group is addressing some theory problems via theory green papers:
Architecture Board. Discussed RFPs on Notification Service (held back), Electronic Payment, Data Interchange Facility (deferred), ANSI X3J4 report, SWIFT, reports from Security SIG, Liaison Subcommittee, Object Model Subcommittee, CORBA Users SIG, and Metrics SIG.
Platform Technical Committee Meeting. Adopted mission statement, IDL COBOL Mapping, extended deadline for IDL Type Extensions, comments are due to CORBA/Core Revision Task Force on Jan 24, the Common Facilities Data Interchange Format (need to read this) is deferred to the next meeting, letters of intent have been received for MOF, Portability Enhancements due on Dec 16, Messaging Service LOIs received, A&D LOIs were due Oct 15, other work in progress includes Object by Value, IDL Java Mapping, and Secure Sockets Layer. COM/CORBA Part B (find out about this) initial submissions due on Feb 17.
Common Facilities Task Force is losing Tom Mowbray (MITRE) as chair and Bill Cox (Novelle) will be interim chair. Bill plans to retarget CFTF to Internet RFPs and will take Internet SIG's architecture and roadmap as a starting place! The roadmap will be considered by email. Great - we can declare a major victory of moving OMG in this direction.
Mike Bradley who runs OA&D TF put ECA Rules on their roadmap.
The Real Time SIG is transferring its work on QoS to the Object Model Subcommittee. They have a paper on real-time CORBA. Also, someone mentioned an ISO document on QoS. Our little QoS paper may be useful to OMG! I will have to find out who to send it to.
Domain Technical Committee Meeting.
The Manufacturing High Level requirements RFI returned 0 responses. But
NIIIP may respond late. There are two AB seats open on the DTF side. Telecom
has an RFP on A/V Streams.
Other work is on business objects (no one may respond to this RFP), Finance,
Healthcare (Patient Identification Service, electronic commerce, Transport.
ORBOS/Common Facilities/EC/Internet SIG Joint Meeting on Internet RFPs.
Bill Cox (Novelle), acting chair of Common
Facilities, led this special meeting aimed at accelerating OMG migration
to the Internet. We used the list of potential RFPs compiled by Internet
SIG and some brainstorming and identified three RFPs to be completed by
the January Tampa meeting, two by ORBOS and one by Common Facilities! One
covers URL-IOR mapping, another a Java IDL mapping, and the last IDL wrappers
for FTP, WAIS, and Telnet. For more information, see the Internet
SIG minutes. This is a success story for Internet SIG and a fairly
big direction change for OMG, likely to affect ORBOS and Common Facilities
principal directions. Our work at OBJS was a major reason for the directional
change.