ER TC notes for OASIS symposium

["Lauren Wood" <lauren@textuality.com>]

I promised to help Tony write his 2-minute presentation of the ER TC 
work at the OASIS Symposium, and I figure everyone can help with this 
;-) Please add comments, content, etc. 2 minutes isn't very long, so 
I didn't want to go into too much detail, but it might also be a 
little light - what do you think?

Lauren

The Entity Resolution TC is working on an update to the old SGML 
Catalogs, to help an age-old problem - how to find the files or 
resources that are related to the file I am reading or editing. A 
classic example is the XML Conference, which asks speakers to create 
XML proceedings. Each author may use a different editing tool, with 
the DTD in a different place, but the submission system needs to 
validate them to the DTD that the submission system knows about, not 
the DTD on your company's network. Using an entity resolution catalog 
lets us tell the submission system to use the DTD it knows about when 
it see a reference to the DTD the file was written to use. 

Take this problem and expand with general entities, schemas, 
stylesheets, and other resources, and you have the need for an XML-
aware entity resolution mechanism, which the ER TC has been working 
on for over 3 years. 

The Committee Draft has been implemented in many products and 
toolkits, including 
- libXML
- Norm's Java resolver classes
- Arbortext Epic
- Stylus Studio
(any others?)

We recently added one small feature (to get around a problem with 
using SAX-based tools), republished the Committee Draft, and are now 
in the public review period. We expect to be entering the voting 
phase for OASIS Standard in mid-year.