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By Barbara Morgan, 22 July 1999 14:36

NEWS A coalition of 20 software companies has agreed to make the Microsoft-developed Open Information Model (OIM) a metadata standard. The OIM is a set of metadata specifications which promotes sharing and reuse in the application development and data warehousing domains. The need for such standards comes about as metadata emerges as a critical element in effective information management. Different technologies, including data warehousing, distributed client/server, databases, and integrated enterprise-wide applications need to cooperate and make use of metadata generated by each other. The Meta Data Coalition's (MDC) OIM is a technology-independent and vendor-neutral metadata standard, and is based on technology developed by Microsoft and some of its partners. These include Ardent Software, Citibank, Commercial Financial Services, Information Policy & Plans (IPP) Branch, Australian Department of Defence, Informix, NCR, Platinum Technology, Red Brick Systems, SAS Institute and Texas Instruments. Microsoft transferred the right to maintain and evolve OIM - a product that ships in SQL Server 7.0 and Visual Studio 6.0 - to the MDC at the end of 1998. "The Meta Data Coalition's goal is to evolve standards for metadata exchange quickly," said Dr Katherine Hammer, co-chair of MDC. "Because of the investment made by MDC's technical subcommittee in defining the two previous versions of the Metadata Interchange Specification, the MDC was able to use Microsoft's OIM to create a robust standard very quickly." She added that four companies can already provide implementations for the MDC OIM: Computer Associates/Platinum, Microsoft, Softlab and Viasoft. Microsoft said it is also submitting three metadata data extensions to be included in the standard later in the year. One of the extensions - knowledge description - allows a user to retrieve information more easily by using business standard terminology. Another extension, the business engineering model, allows users to develop a blueprint that depicts how a company operates in terms of processes and goals. The third extension - the business rule model - allows metadata types to capture, classify and store capturing tools, business process modelling environments and back ends such as workflow engines.