OASIS Technical Committee Work
by Karl F. Best
January 03, 2001
The mission of OASIS is to promote and encourage the use of
structured information standards such as XML and SGML. An important
part of this mission is the development of vertical industry
applications, conformance tests, interoperability specifications, and
so on that make core standards usable. The XML standards developed
under the auspices of W3C, for example, are made much more useful and
valuable by the vertical applications and interoperability
specifications created by OASIS. OASIS does not compete with, but
rather builds upon and supplements the work done by organizations such
as W3C (for XML) or ISO (for SGML). OASIS technical work generally
falls into one of four categories.
- XML applications: Development of applications of XML such as
schemas/DTDs, namespaces, and stylesheets that may be used
horizontally across all industries or in specific vertical
industries. OASIS provides a vendor-neutral home and an open,
democratic process for this work; this
gives all interested parties, regardless of their standing in a
specific industry, an equal voice in the creation of this work.
- Interoperability: Development of specifications and standards that
define how other standards will work together; or how earlier, non-XML
standards can work in an XML world.
- Conformance test development: Development of test scenarios and
cases that can determine what it means to conform to specific
standards; e.g. what does it really mean to "be XML"?
While specific vendors have produced sets of test cases,
OASIS' conformance work is done in a vendor-neutral environment. It
does not rely on any one vendor's software.
OASIS is working with a number of vertical industry organizations
to assist their efforts to move to XML or to develop industry-specific
XML applications. Some of these efforts may take the form of OASIS
technical committees, while others will remain within the industry
organization.
OASIS also cosponsors with UN/CEFACT the ebXML initiative. This
major initiative for the creation of a horizontal electronic business
framework, which draws upon the efforts of other OASIS committees and
other standards bodies, currently has close to 2000 participants from
more than 60 countries on ten project teams.
Current OASIS technical committees (TCs) include the following.
Customer Information Quality (CIQ)
Chair: Ram Kumar, Mastersoft/Cognito (rkumar@msi.com.au)
This new TC
held its first meeting at the XML 2000 conference in Washington,
DC. Based on work developed by Mastersoft/Cognito and AND Data
Solutions, the committee is building a generalized framework for the
exchange of customer profiles by e-commerce trading partners,
including both address and non-address information.
Directory Services Markup Language (DSML)
Chair: James Tauber, Bowstreet (jtauber@bowstreet.com)
DSML is a specification for marking up directory services
information using XML and is based on work previously created by
Bowstreet, Netscape, IBM, Novell, and others. The version currently
being developed (2.0) will include query and modification capabilities
as well as LDAP functionality.
DocBook
Chair: Norm Walsh, Sun (ndw@nwalsh.com)
The DocBook
technical committee develops and maintains the DocBook DTD for
computer documentation and other technical manuals, one of the most
successful and widely supported DTDs in the world. This committee has
been functioning since the early 1990s and became part of OASIS in
1998. The latest release of DocBook, v4.1.2 for XML and v4.1 for SGML,
has been submitted to the OASIS membership for review and will be
balloted in January 2001 to determine whether it becomes an OASIS
Specification. The committee met at the XML 2000 conference to start
work on v5.0, which will be an XML schema.
Entity Resolution
Chair: Lauren Wood, SoftQuad (lauren@sqwest.bc.ca)
This
new TC, which held its first meeting in late November, is defining a
method for the resolution of entities whose definitions lie outside of
the XML instance. This work, first done under the auspices of SGML
Open, the forerunner of OASIS, and called the SGML Open Catalog,
provided a standard method for SGML parsers to resolve entities
through the use of an entity catalog. This new committee is updating
the previous specification to work with XML.
Interoperability/Conformance
Chair: Lynne Rosenthall, NIST (lynne.rosenthal@nist.gov)
The purpose of this TC is to create and document guidelines related to
conformance testing. White papers, test plans, test maintenance
programs, etc. are being produced. This TC is advisory to other OASIS
conformance TCs as well as to other conformance committees and
standards bodies in the XML world.
Registry/Repository
Chair: Lisa Carnahan, NIST (lisa.carnahan@nist.gov)
The Registry/Repository committee is developing a specification, based
on ISO 11179, for registries that may be used for storing and
retrieving XML objects in e-commerce. Earlier drafts of this
specification were used for the XML.org Registry and were a starting
point for the ebXML registry/repository work. This committee held
meetings at the XML 2000 conference in Washington, DC, and is working
toward the goal of completing the specification and submitting to the
OASIS membership in late spring 2001.
Security Services
Chair: Marc Chanliau, Netegrity (mchanliau@netegrity.com)
This new TC, launched just two weeks ago, aims to create a horizontal
e-business security specification, including a set of XML Schemas and
an XML-based request/response protocol, for authentication and
authorization services. Using this specification, users can exchange
credentialed documents that can be authenticated by the receiving
party. Initial work for the TC will be based on S2ML, but will also
evaluate other technologies for inclusion. The committee's first
meeting will be held January 9th.
XML Conformance
Chair: Mary Brady, NIST (mbrady@nist.com) This TC is
producing test suites for testing the conformance of applications to
XML. The test suite consists of thousands of test cases, most of which
have been donated by companies like Sun and IBM. The current test
suite will be completed by the end of December, and it includes
updates for XML 2nd edition.
XSLT/XPath Conformance
Chair: Ken Holman, Crane Softwrights (gkholman@cranesoftwrights.com)
This TC is producing test suites for testing the conformance of
applications to XSLT and XPath. Test cases have been donated to this
effort by companies such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Lotus, RMIT, and
NIST, and work is based on testing guidelines developed by the
Interoperability/Conformance TC. This committee held meetings at the
XML 2000 conference in Washington, DC.
To become a member of an OASIS TC you must be an employee of an
OASIS member organization, or be an individual member of OASIS, and
you must notify the TC chair that you are interested in
participating. Non-TC members may participate in these TCs by reading
the mail list archives, available to the public, and commenting by sending email to the comment list for each committee. Additional information about the OASIS technical
committees, including how to post to comment lists, may be found at the OASIS web
site.