The Metadata Coalition, left with a specification for exchanging data between repositories that’s been implemented by only a small handful of companies, has been trying to raise interest in its cause over at Microsoft Corp, and at Redmond’s new-found repository buddy Platinum Technology Inc, apparently with little success. Although a slew of companies, including Platinum, IBM, Carleton, Brio, Platinum, SAS, Softlab and Leonard Logic said they’d support version 1.0 of the Metadata Interchange Specification (MDIS) this year, to date we could only count Viasoft, Intellidex and ETI who have said their products now comply. Microsoft, which met with the Coalition on August 19th, says the coalition has talked about some level of interoperability, but right now we are not convinced that effort really has any serious effort behind it from many of the members. We heard the same story from at Platinum. The Coalition’s supposedly trying to raise interest in the notion of creating MDIS-based freeware. Platinum says there’ll be little news of Microsoft’s information model design review until Version 2.0 of the Microsoft Repository is out sometime next year. Version 2.0 is the technology which Platinum will integrate into its own OEE Open Enterprise Edition repository; it’ll also port and sell the Repository for use with non-Microsoft databases and operating systems. OEE moves from an entity-model to an object- oriented design in the process. Platinum plans at least two major releases of OEE next year.
