Standards Community Prepares to Explore the Meaning of Interoperability at OASIS Symposium

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

Standards Community Prepares to Explore the Meaning of Interoperability
at OASIS Symposium  

Peter Quinn, Open Standards Advocate and Former CIO of the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts, Will Keynote


BOSTON, MA, USA; 30 March 2006 - "The Meaning of Interoperability" will
bring standards developers and users together at the annual OASIS
Symposium in San Francisco, 9-12 May 2006. The program will feature
three days of presentations where members and non-members of the
international standards consortium will explore the factors that affect
an organization's ability to interoperate with partners in automated
collaboration processes.

"There is more to interoperability than getting the right network
connection between two servers," noted Patrick Gannon, president and CEO
of OASIS. "Interoperability is a concept that crosses all aspects of
business conducted electronically--document design, message format and
protocol, partner agreements and company procedures, IT governance,
business processes and workflow. The OASIS Symposium provides a
face-to-face opportunity to examine practical aspects from others
attendees' experiences in making interoperability pervasive and
invisible."

In the keynote address, Peter Quinn, former CIO of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, will offer one example of the journey to institutionalize
open standards and the cultural, political and commercial impediments
encountered on the road to "open." According to Quinn, "In too many
instances, technology enterprises have been constructed using
proprietary technologies, which has resulted in unnavigable chasms of
information and siloed operations. The cost of any enterprise, today,
demands open standards to insure access to all and a sustainable cost
structure."

The program closes with a keynote by Randy Heffner, vice president at
Forrester's Application Development & Infrastructure Research Group.
Heffner will use Forrester's vision for the future of IT as a framework
to outline standards requirements and address  the question, "How much
business interoperability do we really need?".

Presentations on OASIS work including the Darwin Information Typing
Architecture (DITA), ebXML, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML),
and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) OASIS
Standards will be featured, along with sessions on Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA), Web services, and other topics relevant to
interoperability.

Related events include technical committee meetings, tutorials, training
sessions, and the annual OASIS member meeting. Open to both members and
non-members of OASIS, the Symposium is sponsored by BEA Systems, EDS,
IBM, Intel, PTC, SAP, and Sun Microsystems. The program is coordinated
by the OASIS Technical Advisory Board and chaired by Jacques Durand,
Ph.D., of Fujitsu, and Hal Lockhart of BEA Systems.


Additional Information:
OASIS Symposium:
http://www.oasis-open.org/events/symposium_2006/


About OASIS: 
OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information
Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the
development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. Members
themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight, open
process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite
disparate efforts. The consortium produces open standards for Web
services, security, e-business, and standardization efforts in the
public sector and for application-specific markets. Founded in 1993,
OASIS has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600
organizations and individual members in 100 countries. Approved OASIS
Standards include AVDL, CAP, DITA, DocBook, DSML, ebXML CPPA, ebXML
Messaging, ebXML Registry, EML, OpenDocument, SAML, SPML, UBL, UDDI,
WSDM, WS-Reliability, WSRP, WS-Security, XACML, XCBF, and XML Catalogs.
http://www.oasis-open.org


Press contact:
Carol Geyer
OASIS Director of Communications
carol.geyer@oasis-open.org
+1.978.667.5115 x209