CIO Research Library

This paper is a statement by the OMG Architecture Board (AB) of the expanded vision necessary to support interoperability with specifications that address integration through the entire systems life cycle: from business modeling to system design, to component construction, to assembly, integration, deployment, management, and evolution. This vision is embodied in the OMG's Model Driven Architecture? (MDA?). It describes how the MDA defines the relationships among OMG standards and how they can be used today in a coordinated fashion, and how the approach helps in the creation, maintenance and evolution of standards. It is important to realize that the MDA is a proposal to expand and not replace the OMA, to provide a roadmap and vision that will include and integrate all of the work done to date, and to point the way to future integration standards.

OMG has already specified integration with external specifications (such as XML) and proprietary interface sets (such as Microsoft's DCOM). The MDA approach incorporates this existing work and promises more support for rapidly and effectively creating new specifications that integrate multiple interface standards, from both inside and outside the organization. It is an evolutionary step from how OMG works at the moment, but one that will offer great benefits to those using the OMG interoperability framework. It will also indirectly help all system integrators.