Interoperability events and experiences in ETSI

[Juan Carlos Cruellas <cruellas@ac.upc.edu>]

Dear Dee,

After looking at the exchange of emails with Andrea, something come to 
my mind.

ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), a major 
standardization entity in Europe, which has produced part of the most 
relevant European specifications on electronic signatures, as well as 
other wide-world standards on different areas, has a department that 
regularly organizes what they call Plugests(R), i.e., events where 
wide-world organizations come together and perform intensive 
interoperability tests during a certain period of time (typically one week).

Something like two years ago, a team  was formed for designing, 
implementing and deploy a Portal for providing support to the 
organization of remote plugtest(R) events, i.e., interoperability tests 
that woudl not require phisical attendance of the participants but 
remote participation. I was member of the team that produced such a 
portal, and in fact three events were organized on XAdES and on CAdES 
signatures. At those events, even organizations from outside of Europe 
participated (from Japan, from Taiwan...). The portal included a 
complete set of test cases, and a hardware and software infrastructure 
for allowing participants to upload and download signatures, for getting 
certificates (good but also bad), as well as time-stamps, CRLs and OCSP 
responses. It also provided real-time reports on the interoperability 
matrixes as participants uploaded their reports on verifications of 
others' signatures....Indeed it is a rather complete portal...

This portal allowed to participate in this kind of events paying a lower 
fee than the required for face-to-face events (the participation in 
these events require fee payment, as their organization require quite a 
lot of efforts for participating)

Now, the question that came to my mind, in the view of the potential 
interest in doing some interoperability tests on DSS, is whether, OASIS, 
as organization, could be interested in establishing some kind of formal 
relationship with ETSI in order not to duplicate efforts, and 
potentially take advantage of the deployed portal for adding features 
that could lead to the organization of plugtest events on DSS 
protocols... If you think that this could be interesting, please let me 
know who would be, within OASIS the person(s) in charge of pushing 
forward this movement, and I would try to identify within ETSI the 
suitable persons so that they could start talking....

Thank you very much for your kind help.

Regards

Juan Carlos.