6/15/00 - OMG to Adopt Common Warehouse Metamodel Specification Major Data Warehousing Standard Released


NEEDHAM, Mass., Jun 15, 2000 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- The Object Management Group (OMG) extends its support for distributed metadata standards by publishing a Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) Specification.

In these days of electronic business and marketing, an enterprise's accumulated data have become one of its most significant assets. Analysis of these data not only allows sales and production to be tuned for maximum profitability, but also allows entirely new and profitable products to be discovered and exploited. But it is difficult to merge data into a single warehouse when the originals are spread over a number of different databases, using not only different data models but different metamodels as well.

The term "metadata" refers not only to the set of definitions of the data in the warehouse products, parts, prices, and so on but also to its formats, processing, transformations, and routing from origin to warehouse: everything, that is, except the data elements themselves in the data warehouse. Metadata management, and reconciliation of inconsistent metadata when data from different sources are merged, are the biggest problems facing enterprises working with data warehousing today.

OMG's Common Warehouse Metamodel or CWM provides a standard solution to this problem. Building on three existing industry standards the OMG's Unified Modeling Language (UML), the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and OMG's XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) the CWM starts by establishing a common metamodel for warehousing but then goes beyond this to also standardize the syntax and semantics needed for import, export, and other dynamic data warehousing operations.

Designed to work naturally with object, relational, record-based, multidimensional, and XML-based datastores, the CWM supports data mining, transformation, OLAP, information visualization, and other end user processes. Metamodel support encompasses data warehouse management, process, and operation. The CWM specification extends to application programming interfaces (APIs), interchange formats, and services that support the entire lifecycle of metadata management including extraction, transformation, transportation, loading, integration, and analysis. And, users can resolve specific integration issues by taking advantage of the CWM metamodel's built-in extensibility.

CWM combines the power of enterprise data management and object modeling, making them available to data modelers, database designers, data warehouse users and administrators, and corporate portal developers and managers.

The Specification was developed through the effort of Submitters including IBM Corporation, Unisys Corporation, NCR Corporation, Hyperion Solutions Corporation, Oracle Corporation, UBS AG, Genesis Development Corporation and Dimension EDI. Supporters included Deere & Company, Sun Microsystems, Incorporated, Hewlett Packard Company, Data Access Technologies, In-line Software, Aonix and Hitachi, Ltd.

OMG's CWM Specification documents are available for viewing or downloading at www.omg.org.


About The OMG

With the support of its membership of software vendors, software developers and end users, the OMG's CORBA is "The Middleware That's Everywhere(TM)." Since 1989, the OMG has been "Setting The Standards For Distributed Computing(TM)" through its mission to promote the theory and practice of object technology for the development of distributed computing systems. The goal is to provide a common architectural framework for object-oriented applications based on widely available interface specifications. The OMG is headquartered in Needham, MA, USA and has international marketing offices in Bahrain, Brazil, Germany, India, Italy, Japan and the UK, along with a U.S. government representative in Washington, DC, USA.

For information on joining the OMG or additional information, please contact OMG headquarters by phone at +1-781-444 0404, by fax at +1-781-444 0320, or by email at info@omg.org. The OMG provides current information and services for Distributed Object Computing through The Information Brokerage(R) on the World Wide Web at www.omg.org and at www.corba.org.

Note to editors: CORBA(R), The Information Brokerage(R), CORBA Academy(R), IIOP(R) and the Object Management Group logo(R) are registered trademarks of the Object Management Group. OMG(TM), Object Management Group(TM), the CORBA Logo(TM), ORB(TM), Object Request Broker(TM), the CORBA Academy logo(TM), XMI(TM), MOF(TM), OMG Interface Definition Language(TM), IDL(TM), CORBAservices(TM), CORBAfacilities(TM), CORBAmed(TM), CORBAnet(TM), UML(TM), <>(TM), the UML Cube Logo, and Unified Modeling Language(TM) are trademarks of the Object Management Group. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners.


CONTACT: Object Management Group
Janice Gilman
+1-781-444 0404 ext. 141
janice@omg.org



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