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I recently attended a one-day OMG US Government working group meeting in Washington DC on Model Driven Architecture (MDA) in the US Government (formerly eGov sig). There was a surprising turnout (about 70 people) for the first working group meeting under a SIG that was newly re-formed on Sept 15, 2005. Over 100 people registered. This meeting was to serve as a multi-agency (Civilian & Military) Community of Interest for the application of Model Driven Architecture to US Government Solutions.

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) discussed their Electronic Records Archives systems which utilizes UML and text. Debate was started as to whether or not this was a true MDA implementation, but nonetheless, ERA was touted as a model example. Mitre organization presented the proposed DODAF modelling UML profile. Transformation versus profiling was debated.

The afternoon was topped off by General Services Agency (GSA) disussing and displaying their usage of MDA in their Open Source eGovernment Reference Architecture. This architecture, which comforms to the Federal Enterprise Architecture, utilizes the OMG EDOCs and UML standards coupled with BPEL, WebServices and Java. GSA is prototyping with DataAccessTechnologies, who provide the Modeling tools and the UML to JAVA/WSDL compiler. GSA also married UML with semantic web asserting that ontologies need MDA modelling and the semanitic web publishes models. They do have a desire for an EDOC to WSDL compiler.

Interestingly enough, Corba was not mentioned except during a comment made that OMG has gotten away from unified middleware and moved to unified modelling. But we all know that most GREAT enterprise architectures will wind up on Corba on way or another (J2EE, open source, etc).

QUESTION: Is there anyone else out there using MDA????? Lets hear from you how it is going…….

–Michelle Davis