STANDARDS STALWART OBJECT Management Group (OMG) is accelerating its drive for a modeling-based approach to enterprise collaboration with a recent overture aimed at Web services.

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The OMG is currently developing a standard way to use mapping to connect Web services to its ECA (Enterprise Collaboration Architecture), a framework for modeling complex business processes that tie together systems, customers, and partners electronically. ECA is based on UML (Universal Modeling Language) and is tools-agnostic in terms of development.

Essentially, the ECA gives developers a way to create meta-models that define common ways for representing shared business processes, such as agreeing on a sales contract, as well as the multi-formatted data behind those processes, according to OMG officials. It also defines a common way to store this information, including within a UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) directory or a meta-object repository.

By defining and storing business collaborations as models, companies are provided immunity to the ongoing evolutions of underlying middleware, data formats, and other infrastructure, said Jon Siegel, vice president of technology transfer at OMG, based in Needham, Mass.

"The technology world is moving toward looser-defined roles," Siegel said. "Now that we can define information sent via Web services and XML at the model level, when something new takes over for Web services a company doesn't lose access to all of this information."

Web services standards are just one set of middleware technologies that the OMG intends to link to ECA through mapping, according to Siegel. Currently, OMG is working to extend its mapping to ebXML ( e-business XML), J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition), .Net, and other environments.

Meanwhile at the OMG's next meeting in Helsinki, Finland, in late September, Version 2.0 of the UML will continue to wind its way toward final specification, according to officials. The meeting will also address interoperability issues between CORBA and Web services.