ATLANTA, Georgia - May 31, 2001. Today the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) and the Open Applications Group (OAGI), announced that they have exchanged memberships to encourage closer ties between the vertical needs of AIAG and the horizontal XML work of the Open Applications Group.   "We are very pleased that the Automotive Industry Action Group has decided to exchange memberships with us", said David Connelly, CEO of the Open Applications Group. "We have been working with several organizations in the auto industry and this enables us to stay in close touch with the issues these organizations are facing."   About AIAG   The Automotive Industry Action Group is a globally recognized organization founded in 1982 by a group of visionary managers from DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Company, and General Motors. The purpose: To provide an open forum where members cooperate in developing and promoting solutions that enhance the prosperity of the automotive industry. AIAG's focus is to continuously improve business processes and practices involving trading partners throughout the supply chain.   Under the auspices of AIAG, volunteers from over 1,600 member companies have worked together to resolve issues critical to the automotive supply chain. For more information visit: http://www.aiag.org   About the Open Applications Group, Inc.   The Open Applications Group (OAGI) is a non-for-profit consortium building and delivering XML schemas and business process collaboration definitions for e-Business and Application Integration.   The OAGi is the largest publisher of horizontal, framework independent, XML-based messages and business collaboration definitions for business software interoperability in the world. The work supports ebXML, BizTalk Framework, and the RosettaNet Implementation Framework. The Open Applications Group has hundreds of live sites worldwide and nearly 80 software and services vendors supporting the work. Open Application Group, Inc. members have more experience building XML schemas than any other organization with over six years of extensive experience building an industry consensus based body of work. Their focus has been on End-to-End integration since 1995, when they were the first post-EDI organization to focus on meta-data based payloads for heterogeneous integration. For more information, visit: http://www.openapplications.org.