OAGi Signs Memorandum of Understanding with HR Open Standards Consortium

To all OAGi members and Friends:

We are pleased to announce that OAGi has signed an updated Memorandum of Understanding with the HR Open Standards Consortium. This MoU underscores and amplifies a partnership that has lasted for seven years, since our first MoU was signed in 2007.

The MoU states that in the interest of advancing interoperability and reducing costly duplication of effort, HR Open Standards and OAGi each resolve to:

• Remove architectural and design differences that prevent enterprises from effectively implementing both business libraries together
• Identify and eliminate areas where the standards or standards activities of the two organizations overlap
• Work towards the alignment of data models where business justification for differences cannot be established

To support the efficiency and interoperability goals enumerated above, OAGi and the HR Open Standards Consortium have agreed to the actions below:

• An interoperable data model using a modularity model and business library structure
• Common foundational standards, including relevant specifications produced by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT).
• Use of the OAGIS Business Object Document (BOD) technology for design and construction of business messages
• Common approaches if possible for expressions of their data models. This can include XML, JSON, and other technology expressions as needed

We think this is a very important partnership and we are very pleased to have the HR Open Standards Consortium as our continuing partner in the Open Standards world.

OAGi News for June 2014

Hi and welcome to our June 2014 newsletter! This is our monthly newsletter for the OAGi community.

For regular updates of activities and happenings, you can follow us on Facebook here. You can also find us on LinkedIn here, and Twitter here. We ask our members and friends to "like" and follow us.

Remember, if you are not yet a member of OAGi you can see the benefits of OAGi membership here.

OAGIS 10.1 is Coming!

We are lucky that we have several large members, including Oracle and Microsoft, who are implementing OAGIS 10.0 and we are finding things that need to be added or updated to this groundbreaking new release.

In addition, Boeing is also one of the members implementing OAGIS 10.0 and we are learning a great deal about making OAGIS the Aerospace and Defense standard along with our already existing support for Automotive, Chemical, Agricultural, Metals, High Tech, Life Sciences, Logistics, Retail and others. 

As a result of these events we are listening very hard and the membership has rallied to help make the changes necessary. We don't have a date yet for 10.1 but it will be soon so look for announcements.

This release will be entirely backwards compatible with OAGIS 10.0.

OAGi Work Programs Update

The work programs continue to make tremendous progress! Our current Working Groups include:

1. Semantic Refinement and Tooling
2. Smart Manufacturing Working Group
3. Virtual Business Object (VBO)
4. B2B Network Collaboration

Semantic Refinement and Tooling

Working Group Chair, Serm Kulvatunyou from NIST

The purpose of this Working Group is to advance the semantic precision of interface definitions exposing OAGIS.

The planned steps to accomplish this object include:

Develop a meta-model for holding OAGIS content that satisfies the following high-level requirements:

• Allow for import of OAGIS developer schemas
• Allow for precise content contextualization

Implement a prototype, open source tool, which in addition to above requirements:

• Allow for export of OAGIS contextualized standalone schema or other expressions
• Allow for import of OAGIS contextualized standalone schema

Possible Future scope

• Round trip export of OAGIS developer schemas
• OWL/RDF model
• OAGIS semantic content life-cycle management

The work so far has focused on an RDMS Data Base that essentially contains the design of the CCTS 3.0 from UN/CEFACT and then populate it with OAGIS Content.

This work is now mostly completed and the next step is to design the software to be built to load OAGIS into the DBMS.

Smart Mfg Working Group

Working Group Chair, Nenad Ivezic from NIST

The OAGi Smart Manufacturing Working Group is an umbrella activity to drive thinking, dialog, and action regarding Smart Manufacturing, including manufacturing supply chains at OAGi.  However, the WG would assure cross-organizational collaboration with key folks in other organizations when appropriate.

The focus in the WG is to drive business case development and agenda at both strategic and tactical level and (2) spin-off/collaborate with focused technical groups in both OAGi WGs and elsewhere. 

Virtual Business Object Working Group

The Working Group Chair, Frank Heinrich from iBASEt

The Scope of this Working Group is:

• Virtual Business Object Definition
• Object that has multiple parts owned by different owners
• Single Master Repository solutions do not address all the issues
• Need to identify which properties of an object are the responsibility of which owning or originating systems
• Need to identify what use or operations are allowable on the properties by non-owner systems.
• Need to identify business process or usage patterns that are of interest
• Some aspects may be addressable by the current *_agency attributes
• Some additional attributes or elements may be needed
• The WG will also look at something to help control/explain the relations between different BODs
• For example, update the Item Master before processing the PO or What do I do if I get an update to the BOM and the Item does not exist yet

B2B Network Collaboration

Working Group Chairs, Ian Hedges, E2open and Satish Rmanathan, Oracle

The purpose of this Working Group is to enhance or add to the OAGIS Standard for Trading Partners to setup messaging interactions and exchange messages through a B2B service provider.

This includes:

• Interactions initiated by "Tenants" on the Service Provider network
• Messages delivered to "Trading Partners" who are setup on the network
• "Tenants" interact with the Service Provider network using proposed new OAGIS messages
• Service Provider transforms and delivers messages to Trading Partners in their supported message format
• Service Provider receives messages from Trading Partners in their supported message format, transforms to OAGIS and delivers to tenant

Invitation to Participate:

We invite all members to join us and if you are interested in any of the programs above, please write to us at inquiry@oagi.org.

OAGi Common JSON Initiative

OAGi has been leading an initiative since the Third Quarter of 2013 that is looking at the various practices and approaches to JSON implementations across standards organizations.

We are currently working with the STAR and HR Open Standards because they have JSON initiatives and they also use our BOD Platform. We have recently invited XBRL to sit in and OASIS is now interested as well. We plan to expand this as it is appropriate. 

The group is sharing their plans and experiences as well as surveying other standards organizations for their plans or use of JSON. We are thinking is that it took years to sort out an XML Naming and Design Rules (NDR) that we all use so it is not too soon to look at JSON to see if the same approach is appropriate.

OAGi on You Tube!

Don't forget OAGi Staff have started up an OAGi You Tube channel where they will be uploading learning mechanisms around OAGi, OAGIS, B2B, Mobile, Cloud, and other interoperability topics.

There are two parts to the Channel:

1. OAGIS for new users
2. OAGIS Information

You can find us on You Tube here and here. We invite you to go look around, follow the Channels, and to send us your feedback and ideas.

Meeting Calendar for 2014

Our planned calendar for 2014 is below.  We are also planning a series of webinars and I encourage you to look for the announcements.

Policy Board Meeting	April 15, 2014	NIST	Gaithersburg, Maryland
Plenary and Working Groups	April 16 - 17, 2014 - Completed. Presentations have been posted here.  You must be logged in with member or meeting attendance privileges.	NIST	Gaithersburg, Maryland

Policy Board Meeting	November 2014, dates to be determined	Oracle	Redwood Shores, CA, USA
Plenary and Working Groups	November 2014, dates to be determined	Oracle	Redwood Shores, CA, USA

OAGi Announces agreement with Strategy and Enterprise Architecture Society

I am pleased to announce that OAGi (www.oagi.org) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Strategy & Enterprise Architecture Society (SEAS). 

SEAS is a non-profit organization that promotes an open and unbiased R&D community that shares practical experiences and debates issues to provide valuable insights in the areas of Innovation, Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, and Change Management.

The society also works to disseminate practical knowledge and research.  You can find SEAS on LinkedIn here and their website here.  http://www.bluelighthouse.org.

Purpose of MoU

The purpose of the MoU is to collaborate with the intention of increasing awareness of each other's organization and efforts with the purpose to increase membership and involvement in both OAGi and SEAS.

"This MOU marks a key milestone for SEAS Inc. in it mission to help organizations achieve a competitive advantage.  The partnership with OAGi exemplifies Open Innovation and solidifies our efforts in making an impact in the Strategy & Innovation, Enterprise Architecture, and Change Management space." Said Fadi Hindi, CEO of SEAS Inc.

"This is a natural fit for us and we are pleased to be a partner with SEAS Inc.", said David Connelly, CEO of OAGi.  "We are looking forward to working with a group of like-minded persons like SEAS and we look to expand OAGi's reach as well and SEAS's reach"   

Thank you all for your support and we will be making more announcements as activities roll out.

OAGIS 10.0 is Here! It is now available for download

I am pleased to announce that OAGIS 10.0 is now available for download.  As most of you know this is the result of several years and hundreds of hours of contribution by our members.

  

We started this effort with several goals, including:

• Building functional equivalence with the CIDX Chem eStandards as part of our agreement to merge in 2008. 

• Adoption of the UN/CEFACT CCTS and NDR 3.0 to increase OAGIS interoperability with other standards for our users 

• Thorough review and harminization of common objects with HR-XML 

• Review of all the content of OAGIS to update the capabilities in areas such as eCommerce, Finance, Manufacturing, CRM, etc. 

• Complete review of all OAGIS artifacts to ensure consistency through the standard 

• Complete review of the OAGIS documentation to improve the content and the Scenarios 

• Improve the Data Management capabilities through updating the Verbs and the Verb processing 

I am pleased to say we have reached all of these goals and more through the hard work of our membership.  OAGIS 10.0 is our platform for the future and it is the technology we will base our Mobile, Cloud, JSON work, along with several other planned initiatives.  

For a presentation of OAGIS 10.0 I invite you to review this presentation or go to our website to download it. Members, please remember to sign in.

Thank you to all for your tremendous efforts in completing this special effort.  I congratulate you all!

Excellent Context Specification Working Group Meeting on Tuesday

We had an excellent Context Specification Working Group on Tuesday, June 20, 2013.  The members decided to take a multi phased approach with the first phase to include a survey of experienced member’s practices and document them.

We also decided to document the reasons for and the uses of their implementation of Context.  These will go into a second document that becomes incorporated to the survey of practices.

We identified the list of experienced members and uses of OAGIS and we will begin with their stories next week.

We welcome all members to join us by writing to us here and we welcome non-members to join us as well by writing to us here.

OAGIS 10.0 Release Candidate Three is closed - GA is next step

I am pleased to announce that the OAGIS 10.0 Release Candidate Three period is now closed. Thank you to all who helped make it happen.

The next steps now are to review the feedback, and prepare the technology for shipment. The process flow from the OAGi Development Methodology is just below.

We will be working with the OAGi Community to make this happen over the summer. As we get closer to that time, more details will be announced. Stay tuned for more announcements!

Thank you for your support.

New OAGi Context Specification Kickoff Meeting

We had the kick off meeting for our new Context Specification last Tuesday, May 10 and it was a great success.  We had a good crowd and we reviewed and updated the Project Definition.

The purpose of the Working Group is to build a Specification that is a normative document on how to do Context for OAGIS and other XML message Types.  It will be a separate standard. 

This work will focus on practicality and implementability and will not require special tools or tools that have not yet been built to implement.

We will gather use cases, develop a requirements document, gather current state of the art examples, and develop the specification document.

To all who are interested, we welcome your inquiries or you can go download the Project Definition from our website here.

Our next meeting is Tuesday, June 11, at 4 PM EDT.