Industry Consortia Gather to Collaborate on Spec Development

[Carol Geyer <carol.geyer@oasis-open.org>]

Industry Consortia Gather to Collaborate on Specification Development

HR-XML, OASIS, OMG™, UN/CEFACT and XBRL.org Host Interoperability Summit
Series

Boston, MA, USA; 14 August 2001 -- Standards groups and consortia from
around the world will gather in Orlando, Florida, 6-8 December 2001 for
the Interoperability Summit, the first in a series of inter-consortia
meetings aimed at identifying common ground and coordinating development
of electronic business specifications. Hosted by HR-XML, OASIS, Object
Management Group (OMG), UN/CEFACT and XBRL.org, the Interoperability
Summit Series will identify intersections between major horizontal and
vertical groups in order to promote acceptance of common models and
approaches.

“Duplication of effort and overlap of specifications are major
deterrents to interoperability,” said Patrick Gannon, president and
chief executive officer of OASIS. “We believe that if everyone
communicates and collaborates on common issues, we’ll all be more
productive in achieving our own specific goals. The summit series will
provide a forum to identify and coordinate the work that affects us
 all.”

"Interoperability across platforms, languages and deployment
technologies is of critical importance to CIOs today," said Dr. Richard
Soley, chairman and chief executive officer of the OMG. "OMG's Model
Driven Architecture(tm) is specifically designed to attain that goal,
and lack of agreement on vertical-market models is the major roadblock
to achieving the goal. OMG is proud to be one of the sponsors of the
Interoperability Summit event and to act as one of the hosts for this
first meeting."

Each Summit in the series will focus on a specific modeling topic or
business domain. The first meeting will target Human Resources (HR)
management, with future summits dedicated to other wide-reaching,
horizontal business functions. A second Summit on Procurement is planned
for 2002.

“Human resources is an excellent starting point for the Interoperability
Summit Series, since HR shares many common components and has many
external interaction points and dependencies with other standards
efforts,” said Chuck Allen, director of HR-XML Consortium.

Allen cited an example of kind of overlap the Summit is targeting.
“Recently, the National Association of Purchasing Managers (NAPM)
decided to create an XML specification for the procurement of temporary
staffing. That very same week, HR-XML announced a draft of our
specification for temporary staffing. While it's clear both groups need
to create specifications based on the unique needs of their
applications, it is also obvious some of the objects, processes and
models involved could be common to both. The Interoperability Summit
will help us all identify this kind of overlap, so we can devote our
resources to solving domain-specific requirements.”

Capt. Valerie Carpenter, USN program manager of the DIMHRS project (a
Department of Defense-wide military personnel system) agreed. "The lack
of cross domain standards has long been an obstacle to meaningful
interoperability."

The Interoperability Summit is open to all industry groups, standards
bodies and consortia that have a vested interest in the modeling topic.
In addition to HR-XML, OASIS, OMG, UN/CEFACT and XBRL.org, the Orlando
meeting is expected to attract representatives from ACORD, BASDA, Health
Level Seven, IDEAlliance, IFX, IMS Global Learning Consortium, Open
Applications Group and the NAPM XML Initiative. Other groups are welcome
and may register at http://www.omg.org/interop/.

“The opportunity to agree on cross-consortia models benefits everyone,”
added Klaus-Dieter Naujok of IONA, member of the UN/CEFACT Steering
Group. “Participants in the Interoperability Summit Series will learn
and share information about modeling tools, methodologies and approaches
to meta-data management. The Summit will give us all the opportunity to
disseminate information about our own models and modeling goals and work
proactively with other consortia representatives to ensure capability
across industries and business functions.”


About HR-XML
HR-XML (http://www.hr-xml.org) is a global, independent, non-profit
consortium dedicated to enabling e-commerce and inter-company exchange
of human resources (HR) data worldwide.  The work of the Consortium
centers on the development and promotion of standardized XML
vocabularies for HR.  HR-XML's current efforts are focused on standards
for staffing and recruiting, compensation and benefits, training and
work force management. HR-XML is represented by its membership in 17
countries.

About OASIS
OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org) is the international, not-for-profit
consortium that advances electronic business by promoting open,
collaborative development of interoperability specifications. With the
United Nations, OASIS sponsors ebXML, a global framework for electronic
business data exchange. OASIS operates XML.ORG, the non-commercial
portal that delivers information on the use of XML in industry. The
XML.ORG Registry provides an open community clearinghouse for
distributing and locating XML application schemas, vocabularies and
related documents. OASIS serves as the home for industry groups
interested in developing XML specifications. OASIS technical work
embraces conformance, security, business transactions, repositories and
other interoperability issues.

About OMG
With well-established standards covering software from design, through
development, to deployment and maintenance, the Object Management Group
(OMG) supports a full-lifecycle approach to enterprise integration.
Based on the established Object Management Architecture (OMA) and
emerging Model Driven Architecture (MDA), OMG's standards cover
application design and implementation. OMG's Modeling standards include
the UML (Unified Modeling Language) and CWM (Common Warehouse
Metamodel). CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is
OMG's standard open platform. OMG also issues the CORBAservices and a
rapidly-growing set of industry-specific standards in vertical markets
including healthcare, telecommunications, biotechnology, transportation
and a dozen other areas. The OMG is headquartered in Needham, MA, USA,
with an office in Tokyo, Japan as well as international marketing
offices in the UK and Germany, along with a U.S. government
representative in Washington, DC.

About UN/CEFACT
UN/CEFACT (www.uncefact.org) is the United Nations body whose mandate
covers worldwide policy and technical development in the area of trade
facilitation and electronic business. Headquartered in Geneva, it has
developed and promoted many tools for the facilitation of global
business processes including UN/EDIFACT, the international EDI standard.
Its current work programme includes such topics as Simpl-edi and Object
Oriented EDI and it strongly supports the development and implementation
of open, interoperable global standards and specifications for
electronic business.

About XBRL.org
XBRL.org (www.xbrl.org) is an international group developing the
eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), an XML-based framework
for the preparation and exchange of business reports and data. The
initial goal of XBRL is to provide an XML-based framework that the
global business information supply chain will use to create, exchange,
and analyze financial reporting information including, but not limited
to, regulatory filings such as annual and quarterly financial
statements, general ledger information, and audit schedules.


For more information:
Carol Geyer
Director of Communications
OASIS
carol.geyer@oasis-open.org
+1.941.284.0403