STAR meeting

I am off today to participate in the STAR meeting in california. They are the consortium for standards in automotive retail. STAR has had some really great success in advocating and enabling data integration standards. They build their material on top of OAGIS, thus leveraging an existing data model. This is similar to what HR-XML is doing as well as others. (Look ma, standards convergence!)
I have more to say about OAGIS as a platform later as there is some interesting news. But for the time being, I'm off to STAR.

Microsoft gets behind UML

Could be real exciting news. I saw this posting from Joe McKenrick. Microsoft backing UML as part of its SOA (Oslo Modeler) offerings would be a real boon to the UML world. Templates that bring UML to Visio are nice, but getting backing in a bigger way is enticing. Hopefully they are not simply trying to create buzz. A few other links here and here.