08/18/2005

The Open Group announced that it established a new forum to focus on developing the Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF) and implementing a registry for it.

The Open Group provided the following additional details:

The new forum will be known as the UDEF Forum. The UDEF Forum members will work to establish it as a universally used system, and to set up a registry that will hold UDEF descriptions and identifiers.

The UDEF is a classification system that allows semantic indexing and classification of UDEF data, based on structured unique identifiers. UDEF enables enterprises to categorize their information in a standard and consistent way and reduce cost and time associated with data transformations, resulting in increased interoperability and improved agility of information management.

"Making translations between different data description standards can be very costly, " said Dr. Chris Harding, Director of the UDEF Forum. "The UDEF and its registry will provide a simple, clear, and unambiguous standard classification that will remove current industry confusion and provide significant cost savings."

"Once the UDEF open standard is adopted within enterprise applications, it will provide a key semantics integration enabler for any Service Oriented Architecture," noted Ron Schuldt, Senior Staff Systems Architect, Lockheed Martin Corporation.

"This type of work is very important if we are to ever achieve a high degree of interoperability at the data level," said Dave Chesebrough, President of the Association for Enterprise Integration. "The ability to seamlessly interchange semantically equivalent data provides a foundation for comprehensive integration and subsequent business value."

About Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF)

Developed by the US CALS ISG in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the UDEF provides a method of consistent classification and categorization of data by assigning to every item of data a structured indexing identifier, consisting of an alphanumeric tag and a simple textual description.

More information can be found at http://www.opengroup.org/udef.