SDD Progress Update

[Brent Miller <bamiller@us.ibm.com>]

SDD TC,

I recognize that this is a rather long
email, but please take a few minutes to read it. I believe that we can
conduct most or all of our remaining v2.0 work by email, but if anyone
wishes to have one or more conference calls, please notify me and I will
schedule.

I know that it has been awhile since
we have had a teleconference, but we have been making some progress and
I wanted to send out this update because we will have some actions that
we need to take in the near future.

I apologize for the slower than planned
progress, but the OASIS TC Administrator left OASIS at the end of last
year and an interim administrator has been filling in but he has a large
backlog of work for many TCs (but please thank Robin Cover, the interim
TC Admin, for his diligence on our behalf).

1. For the standards-track documents (specification and schema), the initial public review of the Committee Specification Draft completed with no comments.
   • Our next step is to vote on progressing this to a Committee Specification. That is accomplished by a special ballot that is initiated by the OASIS TC Admin. However, to request that ballot, we must first have a vote of the TC to request that special ballot (effectively approving our current Committee Specification Draft as a Committee Specification). VOTING MEMBERS PLEASE BE AWARE THAT WE WILL HAVE TWO BALLOTS: One to consider authorizing the special majority ballot (which I will initiate), and then the special majority ballot itself (which the OASIS TC Admin will initiate). PLEASE BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR NOTICES FOR THESE BALLOTS AND PLEASE CAST YOUR VOTE.
   • Looking ahead (although we have a few steps to go before we get to this stage), before final approval of the v2.0 standard, we will need to have three statements of use from 3 OASIS organizational members (3 companies). A statement of use, per OASIS process, is "A written statement by an OASIS Organizational Member stating that it is successfully using or implementing a specification in accordance with the conformance clauses stated therein; and stating whether its use included the interoperation of multiple independent implementations ". To prepare for the future, I am asking all members to PLEASE CONSIDER PROVIDING A STATEMENT OF USE, AND PLEASE NOTIFY ME IF YOUR ORGANIZATION IS WILLING TO PROVIDE THIS.
2. For the non-standards-track documents (Primer, Starter Profile and Examples), we have completed the updates for v2.0 (thanks to Merri, Jason and Robin Cover, OASIS TC Admin). You will recall that the content changes for all of these deliverables had been previously posted to the TC web page. The recent changes primarily dealt with migrating the content to the new OASIS document template for non-standards-track documents (I also added an introductory prose document for the Examples package that serves as a sort of "readme" for the XML examples). I WILL BE POSTING BALLOTS TO CONSIDER APPROVING EACH OF THESE WORKING DRAFTS AS COMMITTEE NOTE DRAFTS, SO I AM REQUESTING THAT YOU PLEASE REVIEW THESE ONE MORE TIME:
   • The v2.0 Primer Working Draft 01 is at http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/sdd/download.php/41102/sdd-primer-v2.0-wd01.doc . The changes for v2.0 reflect changes to the v2.0 Examples and were discussed posted some time ago. The most visible difference in this latest version is the conversion to the new OASIS template.
   • The v2.0 Examples Working Draft 01is at http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/sdd/download.php/41101/sdd-examples-v2.0-wd01.zip . The changes for v2.0 reflect changes to the v2.0 specification and were discussed and posted some time ago. The changes in this latest version are (A) Jason corrected one minor error in the SimpleAppClient example; and (B) I added a prose document to the examples.zip package that serves as a sort of "readme" or "start here"; this makes the Examples deliverable more consistent with the others and facilitates version tracking as we proceed through the OASIS process.
   • The v2.0 Starter Profile Working Draft 01 is at http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/sdd/download.php/41100/sdd-starter-profile-v2.0-wd01.zip . This has only minor changes from v1.0, including a few editorial changes. The most visible difference in this latest version is the conversion to the new OASIS template.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Please watch for the ballots for both the standard and the non-standards-track
documents, and please let me know if you have any questions or feedback.
I think we are in good shape to proceed through the process to complete
v2.0, which represents a lot of collective work.

Thanks.

Regards,
Brent

Brent A. Miller
Senior Technical Staff Member, Master Inventor
Intellectual Property Solutions Engineer
IBM Corp.
Tel. 919-543-3621 (TIE 441)

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t
matter, and those who matter don’t mind"
-- Theodor Suess Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss)