The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is a standards body which develops open standards for the mobile industry. Standards Organizations are bodies, organizations and institutions that produce, and in some cases measure, standards. ... Open standards are publicly available specifications for achieving a specific task. ... Mobile phones from various years Several mobile phones A mobile or cellular telephone is a long-range, portable electronic device for personal telecommunications over long distances. ...

Principles

• Mission. Its mission is to provide interoperable service enablers working across countries, operators and mobile terminals.
• Network-agnostic. The OMA restricts itself to the standardisation of applicative protocols; OMA presumes the existence of a networking technology specified by outside parties. OMA specifications are agnostic of the particular cellular network technologies being used to provide networking and actual data transport. In particular, OMA specifications for a given function are the same with either GSM, UMTS or CDMA2000 networks.
• Voluntary. The OMA is not a formal government-sponsored standards organization like the ITU, but rather a forum for industry stakeholders to agree on common specifications for products and services. The goal is that by agreeing on common standards, stakeholders will be able to "share slices from a larger pie"; but strictly speaking, adherence to the standards is entirely voluntary as the OMA does not have a mandative role.
• "FRAND" Intellectual Property Licensing. Members owning intellectual property rights (e.g. patents) on technologies that are essential to the realization of a specification agree in advance to provide licenses to their technology on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms to other members of the OMA.
• Legal status. The OMA's legal status is that of a British limited company (cf. bylaws).

Interoperability is the ability of products, systems, or business processes to work together to accomplish a common task. ... Not to be confused with Get Some Mates The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is the most popular standard for mobile phones in the world. ... Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is one of the third-generation (3G) mobile phone technologies. ... CDMA2000 is a family of third-generation (3G) mobile telecommunications standards that use CDMA, a multiple access scheme for digital radio, to send voice, data, and signalling data (such as a dialed telephone number) between mobile phones and cell sites. ... This article is about the location. ... In engineering and manufacturing, the term specification has the following meanings: Technical requirement An essential technical requirement for items, materials, or services, including the procedures to be used to determine whether the requirement has been met. ...

History

The OMA was created in June 2002 as an answer to the proliferation of industry forums each dealing with a few application protocols: the WAP Forum (focused on browsing and device provisioning protocols), the Wireless Village (focused on instant messaging and presence), the SyncML Consortium (focused on data synchronization), the Location Interoperability Forum, the Mobile Games Interoperability Forum and the Mobile Wireless Internet Forum. Each of these forums had its bylaws, its decision-taking procedures, its release schedules, and in some instances there was some overlap in the specifications, causing duplication of work. The OMA was created to gather these initiatives under a single umbrella. The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) is a standards body which develops open standards for the mobile industry. ... Wireless Village is a set of specifications for mobile instant messaging and presence services. ...

Members include traditional wireless industry players such as equipment and mobile systems manufacturers (Ericsson, Siemens, Nokia, Openwave, Sony Ericsson, Philips, Motorola,Samsung...) and mobile operators (Telefónica, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile...), but also software vendors (Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle Corporation, Celltick...). Ericsson () NASDAQ: ERICY is a Swedish telecommunications equipment manufacturer, founded in 1876 as a telegraph equipment repair shop by Lars Magnus Ericsson. ... Siemens AG (FWB:SIE, NYSE: SI) is the worlds largest electronics company. ... Nokia Corporation (NYSE: NOK) is the worlds largest manufacturer of mobile telephones (as of September 2006), with a global market share of approximately 36% in Q3 of 2006. ... Openwave (formally phone. ... Sony Ericsson is a joint venture established in 2001 by the Japanese consumer electronics company Sony Corporation and the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson to make mobile phones. ... Philips HQ in Amsterdam Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (Royal Philips Electronics N.V.), usually known as Philips, (Euronext: PHIA, NYSE: PHG) is one of the largest electronics companies in the world. ... Motorola (NYSE: MOT) is an American international communications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. ... Samsung Group is one of the largest South Korean business groupings. ... Telefónica CTC Chile building in Santiago, Chile Telefónica S.A. (NYSE: TEF, TYO: 9481 ) is a Spanish telecommunications company. ... Vodafone Group plc is a British mobile phone operator headquartered in Newbury, Berkshire, England. ... Orange SA is a major mobile phone operator. ... T-Mobile logo T-Mobile is a multinational mobile phone operator. ... The Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual sales of US$44. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... now. ... Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) is one of the major companies developing database management systems, tools for database development, middle-tier software (Fusion Middleware), enterprise resource planning software (ERP), customer relationship management software (CRM) and supply chain planning (SCM) software. ...

Links with other standards bodies

The OMA links (or, in standardization parlance, "liaises") with other standards bodies on a regular basis to avoid overlap in specifications:

• 3GPP
• 3GPP2
• IETF
• W3C

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a collaboration agreement that was established in December 1998. ... The 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2) is a collaboration agreement that was established in December 1998. ... The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is charged with developing and promoting Internet standards. ... The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a consortium that produces standards—recommendations, as they call them—for the World Wide Web. ...

Example specifications

The OMA maintains a number of specifications, including

• Browsing specifications, now called "Browser and Content", previously called WAP browsing. In their current version, these specifications rely essentially on XHTML Mobile Profile.
• MMS specifications for multimedia messaging
• OMA DRM specifications for Digital Rights Management
• OMA IMPS (Instant Messaging and Presence) specification, which is a system for instant messaging on mobile phones (formerly known as Wireless Village).
• OMA SIMPLE IM Instant messaging based on SIP-SIMPLE
• OMA DS specification for Data Synchronization using SyncML.
• OMA DM specification for Device Management using SyncML.
• OMA BCAST specification for Mobile Broadcast Services.
• OMA PoC specification for Push to talk Over Cellular.
• OMA Presence SIMPLE specification for Presence based on SIP-SIMPLE

This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP) is a hypertextual computer language standard designed specifically for mobile phones and other resource-constrained devices. ... Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is a standard for a telephony messaging systems that allow sending messages that includes multimedia objects (images, audio, video, rich text) and not just text messages as in Short message service (SMS). ... OMA DRM is a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system invented by the Open Mobile Alliance whose members represent the entire value chain, including mobile phone manufacturers (e. ... Digital Rights Management (generally abbreviated to DRM) is any of several technologies used by publishers (or copyright owners) to control access to and usage of digital data (such as software, music, movies) and hardware, handling usage restrictions associated with a specific instance of a digital work. ... IMPS stands for Instant Messaging and Presence Service. ... Wireless Village is a set of specifications for mobile instant messaging and presence services. ... OMA SIMPLE IM (Instant Messaging) enabler is a work item of OMA MWG (Messaging Working Group) sub working group IM (Instant Messaging). ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... SyncML (Synchronization Markup Language) is the former name (currently referred to as: Open Mobile Alliance Data Synchronization and Device Management) for a platform-independent information synchronization standard. ... // OMA DM is a protocol specified by Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) for Device Management (DM) purposes, by the Device Management Working Group and the Data Synchronization (DS) Working Group. ... Device Management is a standard where users do not have to worry about managing the software on their mobile phone. ... SyncML (Synchronization Markup Language) is the former name (currently referred to as: Open Mobile Alliance Data Synchronization and Device Management) for a platform-independent information synchronization standard. ... OMA Presence SIMPLE enabler is a work item of OMA PAG (Presence and Availability working Group). ...

External links

• www.openmobilealliance.org