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XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) is an Object Management Group (OMG) standard that supports the interchange of any kind of metadata that can be expressed using the Meta Object Facility (MOF) specification, including both model and metamodel information. XMI integrates the Unified Modeling Language (UML), MOF, and XML, and allows developers of distributed systems to share object models and other metadata over the Internet. XMI, together with MOF and UML, form the core of the OMG metadata repository architecture.

There are many advantages of basing a metadata interchange format on XML. These include the following:

  • ·        XML is an open, platform-independent, and vendor-independent standard.
  • ·        XML supports the international character set standards of extended ISO Unicode.
  • ·        XML is metamodel-neutral, and can represent metamodels compliant with OMG's meta-metamodel, the MOF.
  • ·        In the SDK, implementing the metadata services exposed by the connectors as full-blown JMI services automatically provides XMI support. A JMI service provides APIs for streaming metadata in the XMI format. The XmiWriter and XmiReader interfaces import and export XML documents to and from a JMI service.

XMI, together with MOF, is important in the SDK as a foundation technology. By applying a JMI rendering to interfaces, we also provide XMI capabilities, which support a common exchange format for metadata.