OASIS TC Call For Participation: FWSI

["Karl F. Best" <karl.best@oasis-open.org>]

A new OASIS technical committee is being formed. The OASIS Framework for 
Web Services Implementation (FWSI) Technical Committee has been proposed 
by the following members of OASIS: Dr. LEE Eng Wah, Singapore Institute 
of Manufacturing Technology; Roberto B. PASCUAL, Infocomm Development 
Authority of Singapore; Andy TAN, Information Technology Standard 
Committee, Singapore; TAN Kwang Han, Ecquaria Technologies; QUEK Choon 
Yang, Ecquaria Technologies; CHENG Huang Kheng, Singapore Institute of 
Manufacturing Technology; TAN Puay Siew, Singapore Institute of 
Manufacturing Technology; Sujamto PRASETIO, Sun Microsystems; Cassandra 
Ong Sio Hue, eG Innovations Pte. Ltd; Yong Inn Nam, ESS Software Pte.; 
Kenneth Lim, Crimson Logic Pte Ltd; Amardeep Singh, Readiminds Systems 
and Services Pte Ltd; and Paul Tearnen, RosettaNet.

The proposal for a new TC meets the requirements of the OASIS TC Process 
(see http://oasis-open.org/committees/process.shtml), and is appended to 
this message. The proposal, which includes a statement of purpose, list 
of deliverables, and proposed schedule, will constitute the TC's 
charter. The TC Process allows these items to be clarified (revised) by 
the TC members; such clarifications (revisions), as well as submissions 
of technology for consideration by the TC and the beginning of technical 
discussions, may occur no sooner than the TC's first meeting.

As specified by the OASIS TC Process, the requirements for becoming a 
member of the TC are that you must 1) be an employee of an OASIS member 
organization or an Individual member of OASIS; 2) notify the TC chair of 
your intent to participate at least 15 days prior to the first meeting; 
and 3) attend the first meeting of the TC.

For OASIS members, to register for the TC using the OASIS collaborative 
tools, go to the TC's public page at 
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/fwsi and click on the button for 
"Join This TC" at the top of the page. You may add yourself to the 
roster of the TC either as a Prospective Member (if you intend to become 
a member of the TC) or an Observer. A notice will automatically be sent 
to the TC chair, which fulfills requirement #2 above. You may join a TC 
at any time after the first meeting, but in order to be a voting member 
at the first TC meeting you must a) register at least 15 days before the 
first meeting and b) attend the first meeting.

Note that membership in OASIS TCs is by individual, and not by organization.

For non-OASIS members, a public comment list 
fwsi-comment@lists.oasis-open.org is available for the public to make 
comments on the work of this TC; the public may subscribe to this list 
by sending a message to fwsi-comment-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org.

The archives of the TC's private and comment mail lists are visible to 
the public at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/

Further information about this topic may be found on the Cover Pages 
under the topic of "Web Services Implementation" at 
http://xml.coverpages.org/wsImplementation.html. A FAQ will also be 
available on the TC's web page.

-Karl

=================================================================
Karl F. Best
Vice President, OASIS
office  +1 978.667.5115 x206     mobile +1 978.761.1648
karl.best@oasis-open.org      http://www.oasis-open.org





Framework for Web Services Implementation Technical Committee

The following comprises the TC Charter
======================================

Name of the TC: OASIS Framework for Web Services Implementation (FWSI) 
Technical Committee

Statement of Purpose

The purpose of OASIS FWSI TC is to facilitate implementation of robust 
Web Services by defining a practical and extensible methodology 
consisting of implementation processes and common functional elements 
that practitioners can adopt to create high quality Web Services systems 
without re-inventing them for each implementation.

It solves the problem of the slow adoption of Web Services because of 
lack of methodologies to implement Web Services, and a lack of 
understanding of whether solutions proposed by vendors have the 
necessary components to reliably implement an application based on Web 
Services.

It is anticipated that the TC will establish liaisons with some of the 
key web services standards in interoperability, security, business 
process management and orchestration etc; in formulating the web service 
implementation process specification.  Obviously criteria may have to be 
set to select the appropriate standards or specifications.  However, the 
focus on the TC must be to determine the commonly used functional 
elements and specify the scope and purpose of the identified functional 
elements.

The efforts of this TC would:
1. accelerate implementation of Web Services-based systems
2. improve the performance and robustness of such systems
3. improve understanding of Web Services implementations
4. reduce the complexity of such systems and hence reduce the 
developmental and maintenance efforts; and
5. reduce the risk of implementation.

Why is there a need for the FWSI TC?

Through the experience of developing Web Services solutions and working 
with the industry in actual implementations of web service-enabled 
applications, it became apparent that web services implementation needs 
a lot of actual implementation guidelines and there are also a lot of 
commonalities that exist throughout these implementations. If harnessed 
properly, the movement towards getting web services to the mass market 
can be realised that much faster. As such, the thoughts for contributing 
this knowledge and harnessing the vast knowledge out there from all 
parts of the industry was mooted and hence the work towards the 
formation of this TC.

Scope of Work

The TC will develop the following:

1. Web Services Implementation Process Specification. The TC will define 
an implementation process for Web Services by building on the work of 
existing standards. The implementation process specification will 
describe the common implementation steps needed to build robust Web 
Services within the context of a typical system lifecycle process using 
the Web Services Functional Elements. Web Services, being highly 
distributed in nature, do not lend themselves well to classical 
implementation processes. A model implementation process that is 
tried-and-tested will help practitioners in avoiding the common pitfalls 
of implementing Web Services.

2. Web Services Functional Elements Specification. The TC will specify a 
set of functional elements that practical implementations of Web 
Services-based systems will require. These functional elements form a 
basis for practitioners to instantiate into a technical architecture 
using the Web Services Implementation Process. It is the purpose of the 
TC to explore and define the right level of abstraction for these 
functional elements and to specify the purpose and scope of each 
functional element to facilitate efficient and effective implementation 
of Web Services.

The TC will not implement actual commercial products and solutions based 
on the specifications listed above. This will be left to commercial 
entities to implement. The TC’s work will be complete when the members 
of OASIS approve the specifications as OASIS Standards.

An analogy of the scope of the TC’s work would be the recipe for baking 
a cake. The implementation process will be analogous to the instructions 
for baking the cake (eg pre-heating the oven or mixing which 
ingredients) while the functional elements will be analogous to the 
ingredients for baking the cake.

List of Deliverables

The key deliverables and completion dates of the FWSI TC are:
1. Web Services Implementation Process Specification – 30 Apr 2004
2. Web Services Functional Elements Specification – 30 Sep 2004

Anticipated audience or users of the work

The work of the TC will be used by system integrators and software 
vendors as a basis for implementing Web Services solutions. In-house Web 
Services developers in large corporations will also benefit from the 
work of the TC.

Language

All meetings (both face-to-face and phone meetings) as well as official 
correspondences amongst FWSI TC participants will be conducted in English.


The following is additional non-normative information related to 
starting the TC
=====================================================

Similar work done in other OASIS TCs

The work done in this TC is similar to the following work:

1. Work done in OASIS TCs such as WS Security. The OASIS FWSI TC defines 
the functional elements that will be useful to most Web Services that 
are implemented. It does not define the standards for implementing the 
specific components – TCs such as WS Security will handle that. The FWSI 
TC will be tapping on the specifications of various OASIS TCs in order 
to know the capabilities that each functional element will have. Back to 
the analogy of the cake recipe, the individual TCs in OASIS will define 
how to produce the eggs, flour, sugar etc, which the recipe does not 
deal with.

2. Work done in WS-I. WS-I defines the choice of standards to be used 
for each component, as is shown in its Basic Profile release. It also 
defines the interoperability tests for these components. The components 
that form the functional elements in the OASIS FWSI TC’s framework could 
be influenced by WS-I’s recommendations, thus the work of WS-I would 
complement FWSI’s work, but will not interfere with it. Using the cake 
recipe analogy, WS-I may recommend brands of sugar that are safe for 
consumption, and provide tests for that the sugar is edible, but the 
cake recipe will just require that the sugar being used in the 
ingredient is universally accepted as sugar.


First OASIS FWSI TC Meeting

The first OASIS FWSI TC Meeting will be held on the 8th Dec (9am to 5pm) 
and 9th Dec (9am to 1:30pm), 2003, in Philadelphia, USA. The dates and 
venue of the meeting was chosen to allow the TC participants to attend 
the ‘XML Conference and Exposition 2003’, an event co-sponsored by OASIS 
scheduled to be held from the 10th to the 12th Dec 2003.

Meeting Schedule

1. Face-to-Face Meetings (semi-annually)
a. 8-9 December 2003, Philadelphia USA
b. April 2004, San Francisco, USA (tentative)

2. Phone Meetings (bi-monthly, tentatively 10:00am Singapore time GMT+8:00).
a. 28 November 2003
b. 30 January 2004
c. 26 March 2004
d. 28 May 2004
e. 30 July 2004
f. 24 September 2004

Phone Meeting and Face-to-face Primary Sponsors

Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore

Eligible Persons Committed to the Stated Meeting Schedule

1. Dr. LEE Eng Wah, Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology 
(ewlee@simtech.a-star.edu.sg)
2. Mr. Roberto B. PASCUAL, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore 
(roberto_b_pascual@ida.gov.sg)
3. Mr. Andy TAN, Information Technology Standards Committee, Singapore 
(andytan@intrinix.com)
4. Mr. TAN Kwang Han, Ecquaria Technologies (kwanghan@ecquaria.com)
5. Mr. QUEK Choon Yang, Ecquaria Technologies (choonyang@ecquaria.com)
6. Mr. CHENG Huang Kheng, Singapore Institute of Manufacturing 
Technology (jason@simtech.a-star.edu.sg)
7. Ms. TAN Puay Siew, Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology 
(pstan@simtech.a-star.edu.sg)
8. Mr. Sujamto PRASETIO, Sun Microsystems (sujamto.prasetio@sun.com)
9. Ms. Cassandra Ong Sio Hue, eG Innovations Pte. Ltd 
(ongsiohue@eginnovations.com)
10. Mr. Yong Inn Nam, ESS Software Pte. Ltd (inyong@essware.com)
11. Mr. Kenneth Lim, Crimson Logic Pte Ltd (kennethlim@crimsonlogic.com)
12. Mr. Amardeep Singh, Readiminds Systems and Services Pte Ltd 
(amardeep.singh@readiminds.com)
13. Paul Tearnen, RosettaNet (paul.tearnen@rosettanet.org)

Name of the OASIS FWSI TC Convener

1. Dr. LEE Eng Wah, Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology 
(ewlee@simtech.a-star.edu.sg)

Names of the proposed OASIS FWSI TC Chairs

1. Dr. LEE Eng Wah, Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology 
(ewlee@simtech.a-star.edu.sg)
2. Mr. Roberto B. PASCUAL, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore 
(roberto_b_pascual@ida.gov.sg)