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Microsoft Joins Meta Data Coalition

Microsoft Corp. has joined the Meta Data Coalition (MDC) and given the standards group control of Microsoft’s Open Information Model (OIM) in a move both parties say should help companies share data across applications and platforms.

Katherine Hammer, MDC co-chair, says the development is a boost to the 47-member industry group, which already includes several major database vendors -- IBM Corp., NCR Corp. and Sybase Inc. "Adding Microsoft ... will help give the coalition sufficient influence to achieve its goal of evolving metadata standards quickly," Hammer, president and CEO of Evolutionary Technologies Int’l (www.eti.com), says in a statement.

The coalition also includes many prominent vendors of OLAP tools; extraction, transformation and loading tools; and other products related to data warehousing.

The Microsoft OIM is a specification for representing metadata. Along with the Microsoft Repository in SQL Server 7.0, OIM is a major part of the Microsoft Data Warehousing Framework, an architecture for integrating all aspects of decision support from building data marts to OLAP analysis of the data.

Microsoft will participate in an MDC technical committee tasked with integrating OIM and MDC’s Meta Data Interface Standard 1.1. The goal is to create a technology-independent and vendor-neutral specification.

In a related announcement today, Microsoft officials say that Microsoft’s products have been enabled to interchange metadata using the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). --Scott Bekker, Staff Reporter

About the Author

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.