[wsia] WS Interoperability Organisation

[Royston Sellman <royston_sellman@hp.com>]

Just to clarify my point at the end of the phone conference:

 From IBM's press release:

"The mission of WS-I will be to provide implementation guidance to 
support customers deploying Web services, promote consistent and 
reliable interoperability among Web services and articulate a common 
industry vision for Web services."

and

"To assist in ensuring the interoperability of Web services, WS-I will 
initially create a suite of tools and materials for testing 
implementation and conformance with "basic level" Web services standards 
-- XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.  These testing capabilities are important 
so customers can ensure that their implementations comply with the 
best-practices use of these Web services specifications.  Tests will be 
self administered and aimed at uncovering unconventional usage or errors 
in specification implementations, thus improving interoperability 
between applications and across platforms."


WS-I will, I presume, go through a requirements gathering process, and 
move on to the creation of tools for testing implementations. It seems 
to me as we move into use-case phase, where bindings to XML, SOAP etc 
will be indicated, there'll be an opportunity for WSIA to both 
contribute to the requirements phase of WS-I, and to be an early testing 
ground for the WS-I tests themselves. I hope we are able to take this 
opportunity.

A minor point: I am a little disturbed by the similarity of our acronym 
to theirs. I can't think of a good solution to this, but one thing that 
helps is writing them as WS-I (with the hyphen) and us as WSIA. Or maybe 
I need to get out more often :)

Cheers,
Royston