News

Merging of the Metadata Standards

• By Scott Bekker
• September 25, 2000

In a move that occurred more quickly than many analysts thought, the Meta Data Coalition (MDC) and the Object Management Group (OMG) together announced that the MDC will merge into the OMG.

Before this week, there were two metadata standards in the industry for data warehousing and component-based development.

The merger is an agreement between the big data warehouse and metadata vendors to use only one standard so that exchange of metadata between different products and different vendors can be done easily.

The new single standard will be made up of parts from the two existing standards – the OMG’s Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) and the MDC’s Open Information Model (OIM). The MDC (www.mdcinfo.com) will be cease its independent operations and begin work in the OMG to complete the new single standard.

Many analysts did not foresee this merger happening so quickly or even at all for that matter – especially since the OMG (www.omg.org) only adopted its CWM standard in August 2000. At that time most were pleased that there were only two standards.

“This is great for the industry,” says Mike Schiff director of data warehousing strategies at Current Analysis Inc. (www.currentanalysis.com). “This is really good news because it’s at the standards body level with the two major proponents behind it.”

The two proponents Schiff refers to are Oracle Corp. (www.oracle.com) and Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) – Oracle was the main supporter for the CWM and the main supporter of the OIM was Microsoft. Because of this, some analysts speculated that a merger would not happen in their lifetime, given the less-than-cordial relations between the two companies.

“I am really thrilled this happened,” says Schiff. “Just to see the names Microsoft and Oracle in the same press release is an achievement.”  –Alicia Costanza