... With the introduction of the OPUS CORBA mode, a limited subset of OPUS Applications Programming Interface (OAPI) functionality was cast into CORBA IDL so that both OPUS applications and the Java-based OPUS pipeline managers were able to use the same CORBA infrastructure to access information on blackboards. ... Other applications might benefit from running `outside' of the traditional file system-based OPUS environment like the Java managers and, in particular, on platforms not supported by OPUS. ...