Mark Riggle
President
Causal Aspects

Wednesday 1:00pm - 2:00pm

Level: Data Management - Advanced

Data exchange among many systems is a common requirement. Fulfilling that requirement in a systematic way requires metadata of the systems and the data. That metadata is part of a metadata model or metamodel. Different standards organizations have created metamodels for this data exchange problem. However, the different organizations approach the problem differently and thus have different assumptions and modeling views that result in different metamodels. To cover all the competing needs in a repository or repositories requires an integration of the various metamodels and an understanding of the particular problems they were designed to solve. We harmonized 2 particular standards, the ISO 11179 and the OMG CWM (extended to IMM) and discover some fundamental lessons for harmonizing different standards. We show the basic harmonization approach and the lessons learned.

CWM is a core metamodel from the OMG for Model Driven Architecture. The model covers data movement among systems (not just for DW) and is central in the new Information Management Metamodel (IMM) from OMG. The ISO standard 11179 metamodel covers data description and some interchange information. The 2 standards overlap in data description and structure and cannot be directly put together.