The OMA was created in June 2002 as an answer to the proliferation of industry forums each dealing with a few application protocols: WAP Forum (focused on browsing and device provisioning protocols), the Wireless Village (focused on instant messaging and presence), The SyncML Initiative (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.
Its mission is to provide Interoperability of services across countries, operators and mobile terminals.
The OMA only standardises applicative protocols; OMA specifications are intended to work with any cellular network technologies being used to provide networking and data transport. These networking technology are specified by outside parties. In particular, OMA specifications for a given function are the same with either GSM, UMTS, or CDMA2000 networks.
Adherence to the standards is entirely voluntary; the OMA does not have a mandative role..
OMA members that own intellectual property rights (e.g. patents) on technologies that are essential to realizing a specification agree in advance to provide licenses to their technology on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" terms to other members.
OMA is incorporated in California, United States.
Standard specifications
The OMA maintains many specifications, including:
Browsing specifications, now named Browser and Content, formerly named WAP browsing; in current version, these specifications rely essentially on XHTML Mobile Profile
The OMA specifications inspired or formed the base for the following:
NGSI-LD is an API and information model specified by ETSI based (with permission) on OMA specifications NGSI-09 and NGSI-10, extending them to provide bindings and to formally use property graphs, with node and relationship (edge) types that may play the role of labels in formerly-mentioned models and support semantic referencing by inheriting classes defined in shared ontologies.
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