Keynote talk
Speaker:   Andrew Watson, Vice President and Technical Director, OMG
Model-Driven Architecture: Integration in the new Millennium

Abstract:

OMG's mission is to help computer users solve integration problems by creating open, vendor-neutral interoperability specifications, which have
in turn been widely implemented over the past ten years. When every subsystem supports standardized interfaces, such as those based on OMG's
flagship CORBA middleware specification, the task of creating a multi-vendor solution is greatly eased. However, as the scope of IT use has
widened, so there's a greater diversity of systems that need integrating, from embedded controllers to mainframes to web browsers. No longer can a
single integration technology address all these ever-widening requirements.

In recent years CORBA has been joined by a confusion of integration specifications based on open and not-so-open technologies including HTML,
XML, .NET, DCOM and Java. Whilst some are merely unwitting re-inventions of existing middleware (but using the latest trendy technology, of course),
others are genuinely useful innovations, and solve our new integration problems. However, faced with multiple middlewares, each usefully filling
its own evolutionary niche in the integration habitat, we find the wheel has gone full circle - who integrates the integrators?

This talks presents OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA), which addresses this problem by providing a framework for creating interoperabilty
specifications using multiple integration technologies.



Speaker Biography:

Andrew Watson
Vice President and Technical Director, OMG

Andrew has overall responsibility for OMG's technology adoption process, and also chairs the Architecture Board, the group of
distinguished technical contributors from OMG member organizations which oversees the technical consistency of OMG's specifications. From 1992 to
1996 he also chaired the OMG's Object Request Broker Task Force, which was responsible for the development and deployment of the CORBA 2
specification. Previously Andrew spent six years with the ANSA core team in Cambridge researching distributed object architectures, specialising in
distributed object type systems.