On Different Interoperability Modes in Software Engineering : the Case of Modeling Activities at OMG

OMG is mainly famous for its CORBA and IDL activities. In the various working groups of this organization, many different themes are however studied, with the same industrial consensus process that has made the success of CORBA, IDL, IIOP and many other middleware recommendations. Some of the outcomes of these efforts have already gained an important notoriety, like the Unified Modeling Language UML and its associated constraint language OCL. Others like the MOF (Meta-Object Facility, [Crawley 98]) are still less popular but already serve as recommendation basis for a lot of defined and forthcoming normative recommendations for products and processes. This paper discusses some of the running activities at OMG in domains linked to modeling. The main thesis presented here, is that OMG is now centering its activities not only on one interoperability bus, but on two different but related buses: the classical CORBA software bus and the emerging MOF semantic bus. Some illustrations of this recent evolution will be described.