The OMG was established in 1989, with the mission to promote the theory and practice of object technology for the development of distributed computing systems and to foster interoperability and portability for application integration through co-operative creation and promulgation of object-oriented standards. To that end, the OMG has produced the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard (which forms part of the 'Object Management Architecture'), as the answer to the need for interoperability among the rapidly proliferating number of hardware and software products available today.

CORBA describes the protocols for how a network of software components should behave in order to interoperate in a distributed environment. CORBA allows the interconnection and collaboration of objects and applications regardless of the computer language of the applications that provide or use the objects, the machine architecture of the computers involved, or the geographical location of the computers (provided they are connected by a network). CORBA also defines the Interface Definition Language (IDL) that enables client/server object interaction with a specific implementation of an Object Request Broker (ORB). The ORB provides interoperability between applications on different machines in heterogeneous distributed environments and seamlessly interconnects multiple object systems.

The OMG has a proven procedure for the standards and technology adoption process. CORBA is one of the many specifications that have been published by the OMG and should alleviate some of the information technology and information management problems faced in bioinformatics. A further advantage of the OMG standards and specifications adoption process is that its fast-track approach matches the rapidly evolving fields of bioinformatics and biotechnology and will allow the industry to develop interoperable products based on novel technologies. If the benefits of the CORBA approach are fully realised, then scientists may expect increased interoperability and standards in bioinformatics over the coming years.

The missions of the LSR Task Force are to:

• Improve the quality and utility of the of software and information through the use of CORBA and the Object Management Architecture
• Address the unsuitability of text files for representing biological information
• Demonstrate the suitability of object-oriented concepts to biological models and views
• Encourage the development of interoperable software tools and services
• Use the OMG technology adoption process to standardise interfaces for software tools, services, frameworks and components
• Co-ordinate with the OMG and other standards organisations and information providers to ensure common standards

Thus far, fifteen organisations have sent letters to the OMG confirming that they intend to submit a response to the 'Biomolecular Sequence Analysis' RFP issued by the LSR. The EBI will submit a response to this RFP based upon AppLab, a technology that was developed originally during the BioStandards project at the EBI.

AppLab is a generator of graphical user interfaces to command-line driven applications and a framework for integrating software tools. Using the AppLab code generators and a Java compiler, one can generate both client and server components to produce a CORBA based application for command-line applications. Java is the programming language used by AppLab on both ends of the CORBA client/server architecture and generates source code containing all necessary CORBA callings. Thus, AppLab generates a CORBA server that offers the command-line driven applications, and a CORBA client that asks the server to execute an application with its set of parameter values. Finally, AppLab is not a domain-specific application; it can wrap applications from different domains.