[ecoop-info] Whitepaper on Next-Generation Object Database Standardization

[Roberto Zicari]

ODBMS.ORG, a vendor-independent non-profit group of high-profile
software experts lead by Prof. Roberto Zicari, today announced
the publication of a new whitepaper on the current status of
efforts to create a next-generation object database standard
within the Object Database Technology Working Group (ODBTWG) of
the Object Management Group (OMG), authored by ODBMS.ORG expert
and ODBTWG chair Mike Card from Syracuse Research Corporation.

This paper, which is available for immediate and free download,
presents a discussion of technology issues considered in the
Object Database Technology Working Group. 

While the contents of this paper are not to be considered an
adopted standard of any kind, they are presented to create
discussion in the computer industry on this topic. 

Specifically, the OMG plans to invite to a Object Database
Technologies Users and Vendors Roundtable that it is intending to
hold as a special event during the OMG TC meeting in Burlingame,
CA in December 2007.

Following the dissolution of the Object Data Management Group
(ODMG) in 2001, standardization efforts for object databases
languished. 

What has emerged since is a fractured marketplace where each
vendor has developed a unique set of programming interfaces and
features and no truly portable way of interacting with an object
database exists. 

In 2005, the OMG's Object Database Technology Working Group was
formed as the successor to the ODMG, and its first effort has
been to create the object equivalent of the relational calculus.
The group believes that the foundation for this "object calculus"
can be found in the research done by ODBMS.ORG expert Prof.
Kazimierz Subieta and his students at the Polish-Japanese
Institute of Information Technology.

The white paper is supposed to serve as an introduction to Prof.
Subieta's "stack-based architecture" (SBA) and to define the OMG
version of it. The definitions and semantics of SBA will, in the
belief of the authors, allow the construction of a complete and
correct object model that supports a powerful object query
language as well as a complete and correct set of equivalent
native programming language bindings.

The White Paper can be downloaded at:
http://www.odbms.org/experts.html

More information about the work of the ODBTWG at objectdb at omg.org.
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