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Microsoft Opens Design Review for OIM Metadata Extensions

As the Meta Data Coalition (MDC, www.mdcinfo.com) accepted the Open Information Model (OIM) as the metadata standard, Microsoft Corp. announced it will hold an open design review to gather industry feedback on new metadata extensions.

The OIM extensions, which are the result of collaboration with industry partners and the effort initiated with the Meta Data Coalition in December 1998, will enable businesses to integrate line-of-business, data warehousing, and knowledge management environments.

The open design review period for the new model extensions begins today with the availability of preliminary specifications for the knowledge description, business engineering and business rule models.

The knowledge description model allows knowledge workers to retrieve information by using business-standard terminology. It also supports the interchange of business concepts and terms between applications.

The goal of business engineering is to allow customers to develop a blueprint that depicts how a company operates in terms of processes and goals.

The business rule model allows metadata types to capture, classify and store business rules, thereby enabling interchange between rule-capturing tools, business process modeling environments and back ends such as workflow engines.

This open design process is expected to conclude with an industry partner review this fall, where updated specifications, final input and early product demonstrations will be presented. -- Thomas Sullivan

About the Author

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

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