OASIS EML TC CALL

Hi All

First of all apologies for the problems with the TC call yesterday and for any inconvenience. In view of the urgency of getting EML v7.0 into the approvals process, as I will explain below, I propose to try and move things on in offline mode rather than delay by trying to reconvene the meeting in the next couple of weeks. Below is a brief resume of the discussions I’d hoped we would have had on the call.

Welcome

First, let me welcome John Wack and Carmelo Montanez-Rivera from NIST to the TC. They both joined several weeks ago and now having served their probationary period are full voting members.

IEEE/P1622 Update

The work of the P1622 committee has progressed quite quickly over the last few months and now they are at the start of their approvals process for the standard to support the UOCAVA (Uniform and Overseas Citizens Assistance in Voting Act) requirements. This standard will come into play in next year’s presidential elections in the USA. Several of us have been very closely involved in their work most notably David, Peter, Neal and John Wack, so there should be few surprises to us. In addition I have been liaising with their committee chair and IEEE officials on the legal and IPR issues of them using EML as their base standard. The understanding and agreement between us is that we need to move the approval of their standard and EML v7.0 forward in parallel and we will be looking to put out a public notice outlining this and the joint collaboration and common goals of both organisations. How we move forward together in the longer term has still to be finalised. P1622 intend to look at other parts of EML that might support USA Use Cases beyond the UOCAVA needs, and we of course are still intending to submit EML to ISO. So how that all comes together and is maintained has to be sorted out but for now we have to manage the v7.0/P1622 standards approvals processes, hence the urgency for us to get things moving on our side. I’m sure David or John will provide more information if I’ve missed anything important or have got some aspects wrong.

EML v7.0

You will have seen the various packages that David and I have produced over the last couple of weeks. He has put together a large zip file that contains the schemas, dictionaries, models, examples, etc and I have produced a first Working Draft of the v7.0 Specification document. All of this material is on the KAVI site. The updates incorporate all the P1622 changes, some new requirements from Australia who are a user of EML for their State and National elections, plus some other changes to reflect CIQ v4 and other external updates . We need now to pull this altogether into a final package that can proceed to ballot for approval as a Committee Specification Draft and to go out for Public Review. I will be talking to David later today to finalise some outstanding queries and barring any last minute hiccups I intend setting up the ballot next week so please watch your In-boxes for announcements on this. If there were any questions that you had intended raising on the TC call about any of this material then please let me have them in the next couple of days. We do of course have the Public Review period (30 days) for you to raise issues if you don’t have the time right now to go through it all in detail.

EML v6.0 Left-Overs

We have two sources of left-overs from our EML v6.0 update. First there are some deferred requests that came in via the Public Review, mainly from Neal on the Audit requirements. I’m going to check with David how much of this has been dealt with in the P1622 work and how much will be part of their future work. If there are still items that Neal feels need to be addressed then I propose that he raise them again in the v7.0 Public Review rather than try and resolve them all now before we start the approvals process. If we feel work is necessary in this area then I’ll liaise with David and Neal to get it underway now rather than wait until after the Public Review period has closed. The second set of left-overs are those that came out of Rich Cardone’s analysis of EML. Most of them we deferred because they were potentially complex and resource intensive. David has made a number of changes to the structure of EML in v7.0 and this may have resolved some of them. I propose we ask Rich to conduct a fresh review of v7 when it’s posted for Public Review and we can then assess whether we can and should make any of his suggested changes.

Way Forward and Timetable

To summarize, David and I will put together the final v7.0 package in the next couple of days and I will post that for a ballot next week. If anyone has any comments or questions on the daft material so far please let me have them immediately. We will look to use the Public Review period to re-visit some of the points raised previously. We must endeavour to keep in step with the P1622 approvals process although of course we have to follow our procedures and satisfy ourselves and the rest of the OASIS membership that EML v7.0 is fit for purpose.

And finally, if there are any objections to any of this please raise them without delay.

Regards

John Borras

Chair OASIS E&VS Technical Committee

m. +(0)44 7976 157745

Skype: gov3john

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