OASIS said on Thursday it has formed a technical committee to advance the Service Data Objects (SDO) specification, which is intended to simplify the way SOA applications handle data.With SDO, application programmers can access and manipulate data from heterogeneous sources such as relational databases, XML data sources, Web services and enterprise information systems.“By offering a common facility for representing collections of data, regardless of data source type, SDO gives application developers a more simple, unified programming model and enables tools to work across heterogeneous data sources consistently,” said Shawn Moe of IBM, who is convening the OASIS SDO Technical Committee, in a statement released by OASIS. The committee will be affiliated with the OASIS Open Services Architecture Member Section, where the Service Component Architecture (SCA) family of specifications is being developed. SDO is part of SCA. Together they define a language-neutral programming model letting developers exploit SOA, OASIS said. SCA has been focused on defining models to build and assemble service components to for SOA. SDO is intended to provide a consistent method for data-handling within SOA applications. The technologies were turned over to OASIS in March. SCA and SDO were launched in late-2005, with the support of companies such as BEA Systems, IBM and Oracle. BEA, IBM, Progress Software and SAP issued statements supporting formation of the committee. “(SDO) is a standard that can help enable a service-oriented approach to data integration, which represents a critical aspect of any comprehensive SOA platform deployment,” said Ed Cobb, vice president of Emerging Technology and Standards at BEA, in a statement released by OASIS. Technology Industry