FW: OASIS Technical Work - Year in Review

[Laura Walker <laurawalker@earthlink.net>]

NOTE: This message from: Norbert Mikula [SMTP:Norbert@datachannel.com]


OASIS Technical Work - Year in Review

>From :

Norbert H. Mikula
Chief Technical Officer
OASIS

To :

OASIS Membership

CC :

OASIS and XML.org Website

* Executive Summary *

- The busiest year ever

1999 was - technically speaking - the most productive year in the history 
of the consortium. Never before did OASIS have so many active initiatives 
and so many deliverables produced as over the last 12 months.

Clearly this success is largely due to the efforts and commitment of the 
chairpeople of the respective technical committees as well as the
contributions 
of all our active members - you !

Thanks to the initiative of the board of directors, especially 
Bob Sutor (Chief Strategy Officer), Bill Smith (President) and 
Laura Walker (Executive Director), OASIS has formed various strategic
partnerships 
that have led to new technical work, which is conducted in cooperation 
with our new partners.

- More evangelism

OASIS has become very active in informing and educating the industry
on the outcome of our work. Thanks to Carol Geyer (OASIS Program
Manager) many OASIS press releases were published, further
promoting our leadership role.

At XML Europe '99, I presented OASIS work at the GCA's "Standards Update" 
session. We continued this new tradition at XML '99.

I represented and promoted the consortium's work at XML One in Europe
(October), 
at the Gartner Conference on Enterprise Application Integration (November) 
as well as XML '99 (December). Other board members have had opportunities 
to speak about our technical work at conferences all over the globe as well,
including Laura Walker (Executive Director) and Bill Smith (President).

Our new European representative, Pam Gennusa, also promoted
OASIS technical work at a number of events in Europe, as did Simon
Nicholson former Chairman of the OASIS Board of Directors.
Bob Sutor (Chief Strategy Officer) presented at a meeting in
Tokyo in August.

* OASIS Technical Committees *

- XML Conformance (Mary Brady, NIST)

Objective : Address issues relating to XML conformance

Delivered : The first XML conformance test suite has been published
with over 1000 documented test cases.

- Docbook (Eduardo Gutentag, SUN)

Objective : Develop a DTD for the documentation of technical material
including, but not limited to, computer hardware and software.

Delivered : Finalized version 3.1
Official Docbook Guide is available (by Norm Walsh via O'Reilly)

- XML Tables Model (Norm Walsh, Arbortext)

Objective : Create an XML version of the SGML Exchange Table
Model (OASIS TR 9503:1995)

Delivered : Published its work with Technical Memorandum TM 9901:1999

- Registry and Repository (Terry Allen, Commerce One)

Objective : Develop a specification for an interoperable registry and
repository for XML related entities including, but not limited to,
DTDs and schemas.

Delivered : Presented first draft of its specification work.
(This work also directly ties into the ebXML work underway.)

- CGM-Open (Dave Cruickshank, Boeing)

Objective : Promote the use of intelligent graphics - Computer Graphics
Metafile - CGM

Delivered : WebCGM Interoperability Demo at XML Europe '99
                WebCGM 1.0 became W3C Recommendation

* New Technical Committees *

The ebXML initiative has started 8 new committees. The objective
of ebXML is to develop an XML based framework for the global exchange
of e-business data.

ebXML Requirements
Business Process Methodology
Technical Architecture
Core Components
Transport/Routing and Packaging
Registry and Repository
Technical Coordination & Support
Marketing, Awareness & Education

We are also in the process of forming other new OASIS Technical Committees 
on which we will update you on soon.

* The year ahead *

OASIS will continue to expand its role as a leading standards setting body 
working on issues relating to conformance and interoperability in the arena
of
all applications of structured information processing. We will also continue
to 
put further emphasis on the emerging issues of XML based e-commerce
applications.

It has been a pleasure and privilege to work with you over the last 12
months 
and I am looking forward to future joint endeavors.

Norbert H. Mikula
Chief Technical Officer
OASIS

* Relevant pointers *

- For more information on our Technical Committees

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/
<http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/> 
http://www.oasis-open.org/html/news.html
<http://www.oasis-open.org/html/news.html> 

- OASIS related websites

http://xml.org <http://xml.org/>   
http://www.ebXML.org <http://www.ebxml.org/>   
http://www.cgmopen.org <http://www.cgmopen.org/>  
http://www.oasis-open.org <http://www.oasis-open.org/>  

----------------------------------------------
Norbert H. Mikula
Chief Technology Officer
Norbert@DataChannel.com <mailto:Norbert@DataChannel.com> 
DataChannel, 600 108th Avenue NE 9th Floor, Bellevue, WA 98004
Phone: 425.462.1999 Fax: 425.637.1192 http://www.datachannel.com
<http://www.datachannel.com/>